Wes Digs Deep!

Everyone knows that colleges and universities are now under enormous economic pressure. From the decline in the number of high school age students over the next several years—the demographic cliff—to a national deterioration of trust in higher education, schools are facing a difficult future. Despite a robust application pool and an endowment that has grown significantly over the last 15 years, Wesleyan is not immune to these long-term challenges. Add to those the attacks on universities from Washington over the last two months and you have a recipe for financial disaster.

But given the dynamic creativity of our community and our insistence to regard every challenge as an opportunity, we have developed a plan to acquire new resources that will provide long-term financial stability to the university we love. We must dig deep, and so we will.

WES DRILLS!

Yes, while others are trying to placate the madness the Trump administration in March or to save money by cutting back on the ingredients essential to student success, we at Wesleyan are defying expectations. After careful consideration by our experts in wellness and working with our interdisciplinary alumni in the geophysical energy space, we have determined that there are enormous energy reserves directly under Andrus Field. We just have to drill to get at them.

The 80 or so wells planned above will be just the start. We have reason to believe that at Long Lane there are also energy (and chemical) resources buried deep beneath the soil. Although for the last several years we have advocated for not claiming the resources that are part of the earth itself, we have come to believe that true sustainability must come from within. Within Andrus Field. After all, how can something that is deeply part of the earth be really bad for us? We just need to find the technologies to burn it in “clean enough” ways.

The future is under our feet. To protect academic freedom and prove economic security: Drill, Wesleyan, Drill!