April 2020 – Roth on Wesleyan

Choosing Your (Our) University

April 23, 2020 by Michael S. Roth '78

Throughout the spring, high school seniors with the acceptance letters in hand, normally visit campuses as they try to decide where to attend college. They are trying to envision the school at which they will be most likely to thrive. Where will I learn the most, be happiest, and form friendships that will last a lifetime? How to choose? As I do each spring, I thought it might be useful to re-post my thoughts on choosing a college, with a few revisions for this season of pandemic. The most important issue this year for many will be that they cannot visit schools to get a feel for the campuses where they might live. Schools are offering online substitutes, but it’s hard to pick when one doesn’t get to feel one’s reaction. I invite you to visit our Admitted Students website to learn more about Wesleyan.

Many students today are wondering whether campuses will be open in the fall, and I am hopeful that Wesleyan (like other schools our size) will have a normal academic year. Sure, we expect to take more health precautions than ever before, and we will be building our capacity to test members of our community, to provide supportive isolation to those who fall ill, and to minimize opportunities for the spread of any illnesses. In the months ahead we are preparing to provide a safe, robust and holistic education to our students come the fall semester.

Of course, for many the decision will be made on an economic basis. Which school has given the most generous financial aid package? Wesleyan is one of a small number of schools that meets the full financial need of all admitted students according to a formula developed over several years. Wesleyan has made a commitment to keep loan levels low and to maintain only moderate (very close to inflation) tuition increases. We also offer a three-year program that allows families to save about 20 percent of their total expenses, while still earning the same number of credits.

After answering the question of which schools one can afford, how else does one decide where best to spend one’s college years? Of course, size matters. Some students are looking for a large university in an urban setting where the city itself plays an important role in one’s education. New York and Boston, for example, have become increasingly popular college destinations, but not, I suspect, for the classroom experience. But if one seeks small classes and strong, personal relationships with faculty, then liberal arts schools, which pride themselves on providing rich cultural and social experiences on a residential campus, are especially compelling. You can be on a campus with a human scale and still have plenty of things to do. Wesleyan is somewhat larger than most liberal arts colleges but much smaller than the urban or land grant universities. We feel that this gives our students the opportunity to choose a broad curriculum and a variety of cultural activities on campus, while still being small enough to encourage regular, sustained relationships among faculty and students.

All the selective small liberal arts schools boast of having a faculty of scholar-teachers, of a commitment to research and interdisciplinarity, and of encouraging community and service. So what sets us apart from one another after taking into account size, location, and financial aid packages? What are students trying to see when they visit Amherst and Wesleyan, or Tufts and Pomona?

As students scan the Wesleyan website, go to chatrooms and listen to current students talk about their experiences, I hope our they feel the brave exuberance and ambition of our students, the intelligence and care of our faculty, the playful yet demanding qualities of our community. I would like prospective students to get a sense our commitment to creating a diversity in which difference is embraced and not just tolerated, and to public service that is part of one’s education and approach to life. Our students have the courage to find new combinations of subjects to study, of people to meet, of challenges to face.

Whatever college or university students choose, I hope they get three things out of their education: discovering what they love to do; getting better at it; learning to share it with others. I explain a little bit more about that in this talk to admitted students a few years ago:

We all know that Wesleyan is hard to get into, but even in the group of highly selective schools, Wes is not for everybody. We aspire to be a community committed to boldness as well as to rigor, to idealism as well as to effectiveness. Whether in the sciences, arts, humanities or social sciences, our faculty and students are dedicated to explorations that invite originality as well as collaboration. The scholar-teacher model is at the heart of our curriculum. Our faculty are committed to teaching and to shaping their disciplines. At Wesleyan, we know how to work hard, but we also know how to enjoy the work we choose to do. That’s been magically appealing to me for more than 30 years. I bet the magic will appeal many of those who are still in the process of getting to know our extraordinary university.

Two Wesleyan Lives: Victor Gourevitch and Andrew Stuerzel

April 19, 2020April 18, 2020 by Michael S. Roth '78

This past week I had the experience of mourning two Wesleyan friends in very different circumstances. The first was my beloved teacher Victor Gourevitch, who died on April 14 at the age of 94. The second, devastatingly unexpected loss was my colleague and friend Andrew Stuerzel, Wesleyan Class of 2005, who passed away after a medical emergency on April 17th. Andrew was 37.

I studied ancient philosophy, political philosophy and, most memorably, Hegel with Victor from 1976-1978. He was intense and challenging, and he cared deeply about opening his students’ thinking to enduring questions and problems. He was a student of the German-Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss, and he remained dedicated to what Victor called the zetetic dimension of Strauss’s thought. A few years after I graduated, we worked together on publishing the letters between Strauss and the Russian/French Hegelian Alexandre Kojève (in Strauss’s On Tyranny). While many other American students of Leo Strauss went on to a pious celebration of conservatism and the market economies of modern democratic regimes, Victor was a lifelong opponent of this reductionist approach to political philosophy. He was also an opponent of both the naive and the authoritarian forms of what’s called progressive thinking. A man of immense learning, Victor could be ruthlessly critical of the cliches we use to get along (or to bring others along), and he could also be enormously generous to those who were willing to open their minds and hearts to inquiry. Some of his great friends were artists and musicians devoted to experimentation and creativity, or philosophers with whom he strongly disagreed. Along with his wife Jacqueline (who taught painting at Wesleyan for many years), he was among the most hospitable, gracious people I’ve known. I am so grateful for his teaching and his friendship.

A day after Victor’s burial, I received the shocking news that Andrew Stuerzel ’05 had collapsed and passed away during a visit to Middletown. Not long after graduating from Wesleyan (and traveling in Asia), Andrew joined our Office of Admission. In 2012 he moved over to University Relations, first as a Major Gift Officer and then as Associate Director for International Advancement. As an undergraduate at Wesleyan, Andrew played baseball, rugby, and earned the NESCAC All-American Award for football. Andrew’s major was East Asian Studies and, following graduation, he completed Stanford University’s advanced Japanese Language Program. After 10 years at Wes, Andrew decided to pursue a new position this past January with Boston Children’s Hospital.

I got to know Andrew when we traveled together in Asia. He seemed to me indefatigable—always ready for a new adventure, taking on a new assignment, curious about some new place to visit. He was enormously helpful as a colleague, and he established deep and lasting friendships with alumni and parents of Wes students all over the world. We enjoyed many a meal together (and suffered together with food poisoning) as we sang the praises of alma mater in order to raise support for its programs. His easy smile and authentic exuberance made him a cherished colleague to so many of us.

Andrew was a devoted husband to his wife, Adriana Rojas ’07, and loving father to children, Reese and Marco. He will be sorely missed by many. Family and friends have created a Gofundme page in his honor.

There are so many losses these days, and they are even harder to bear in our isolation from one another and our traditional rituals of mourning. If you are grieving, I hope you remember there is a community of Wesleyan support. Reach out, take care of one another, and take care of yourselves.

Post updated with corrected dates.

Promoting the ‘Virtuous Contagion’ of Civic Engagement

April 9, 2020April 9, 2020 by Michael S. Roth '78

Although the conditions for stimulating civic engagement have changed, the importance of making informed choices in determining the country’s political leadership has rarely been clearer. We won’t be knocking on doors in the immediate future, but there are many other ways to get involved. Wesleyan continues to support #E2020, and we need the energy of students, faculty and staff to make this work! I recently wrote about this subject for Inside Higher Education.

In recent days, I was looking for a break from reading about COVID-19, and what did I stumble upon? Articles about the disappointing turnout of young voters in the Democratic primaries thus far. In the United States, ever since 18-year-olds got the vote in 1972, people between 18 and 29 have voted in smaller numbers than other age groups.

Part of the reason for this, apparently, is that it takes time to adjust to any public activity. Voting is a habit that develops from being part of a community, and it takes a while to get it going, especially when you are just entering adulthood and pulling together an independent life.

Reading about voting, like reading about anything these days, brought me back to ideas of contagion, isolation and interaction. Maybe the failure to vote is like the widely reported failure of younger people to self-isolate; they don’t feel they belong to the community that’s at risk. We are now asking for immediate feelings of communal connection when we ask people to stay away from one another. These preventive measures are encouraged to protect some of the most vulnerable: the aging, people with underlying and chronic health issues, the economically disadvantaged. But have we encouraged connectivity of young people with these groups?

The term being used for these measures is “social isolation.” A grim term indeed, but, as Nicholas Christakis has said, we should really be speaking of “physical isolation.” After all, we can remain safely isolated from one another physically while staying socially connected. Via our ubiquitous technological networks, we can have a virtuous social and political contagion even as we avoid malignant physical contagion by keeping six feet apart.

And maybe it’s virtuous contagion that we need to stimulate participation in the vital 2020 elections. Given the current administration’s penchant for voter suppression and the very real problem we would face if people had to come out to vote during an epidemic, one can easily imagine attempts to use the fear of contamination to make it more difficult to cast ballots. This would especially be the case in urban areas where voting happens in crowded places.

The best way to attack cynicism, apathy or voter suppression is through authentic civic engagement between elections. One of the great things about this kind of engagement is that it is contagious. As we replicate efforts to bring people into the political process, we create habits of engagement and participation. Concern for the public sphere — like a virus — can spread. Usually this happens through face-to-face interaction, but now we must turn to virtual tools — notorious in recent years for being deployed to misinform or stir hatred — to strengthen networks for democracy.

At Wesleyan University, we’ve begun a project called Engage 2020 that aims to bring more students into the public sphere to increase their civic preparedness and broaden their liberal learning. The next eight months offer a crucial opportunity for civic participation and liberal education through engagement with the public sphere. With the launch of the E2020 initiative, we provided a number of pathways for student skill and leadership development via direct participation in civic life. On a nonpartisan basis, we offered mini-internships linked with classes, funded student work to increase voter participation and awarded small grants to students to travel to areas where political races were of particular concern.

Of course, circumstances have now changed. We no longer want to encourage travel or to contribute — directly or indirectly — to the kinds of rallies characteristic of political campaigns. Still, there are other ways for colleges and universities to encourage meaningful civic engagement — and to make that engagement contagious.

We can support our students (through internships or virtual fieldwork classes for credit) in helping other people find out how they can register to vote or in working on campaigns, all from home — plugging into virtual networks that allow “knocking on doors” from computer to computer, from phone to phone. Working with organizations like Campus Compact or Civic Nation, MyFaithVotes or Let America Vote, the Chamber of Commerce or the League of Women Voters, students can connect with large numbers of people through networks that don’t require travel, or even hand shaking!

Although some of the commentary on the difficulty of Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign focuses on the failure to increase turnout among 20-somethings, it’s important to note that many thousands of college students across the country are already stepping up to their political responsibility. In our E2020 initiative, we’ve invited several other colleges and universities with strong civic engagement programs to join us in embracing the educational value of political participation. More than 75 quickly signed up — from large community colleges to small liberal arts colleges, from HBCUs and Christian colleges to large, secular research universities. They recognize that civic engagement is good for students, for their institutions and for the country.

This is an anxious time, a time when we have to stay away from our neighbors, our fellow citizens, in order to protect ourselves and the greater good. In circumstances like these, some social networks break down, and we see their disintegration in examples of hoarding, price gouging and general selfishness masquerading as independence. But we also see other social networks coming alive as neighbors look out for one another — providing food, medicine, even communal serenading.

This is also a crucial time for American democracy, an inflection point that will determine the direction of the country and of the world’s environment for many years to come. Colleges and universities have a duty to pay attention to the physical health of their constituents while also attending to the civic health of the nation. By promoting a virtuous contagion of thoughtful, networked civic engagement, our institutions can prove once again that we can respond to dire challenges and make a potent contribution to the public good.

A Quiet Campus as April Blooms

April 7, 2020 by Michael S. Roth '78

We are now in the third week of remote learning, physical distancing and trying to maintain community while keeping apart. My class’s reading this week includes a critique of science and reductive, quantitative thinking from the early days of critical theory. One of my students asked if our theorists from the 1940s would today reject stay-at-home rules because they were based on data-based, probability modeling. It was a question I hadn’t expected, and it did point to the limitations of some humanistic critiques of science when faced with biological threats. When is conformity a threat, and when is it life-saving? When is it both? Whether we are in a Zoom conversation or in a classroom, my students always provoke me to think harder about enduring questions.

After class yesterday I took a stroll around Wesleyan. The few students I encountered were appropriately social-distancing (and reading). I waved to men’s lacrosse coach John Raba and family. I wonder if we were all thinking, “Wait until next year!” It was a lovely day, but I’m used to an increasingly boisterous April campus, and it was so, so quiet! The bushes and trees are expressing themselves in lovely bouquets, but almost nobody is here to take them in. I miss our colleagues and students!