Michael S. Roth '78 Giving Tuesday was a great success here at Wesleyan with over 3,674 gifts received. This triggered the generous $300,000 donation to financial aid from the Frank-Kim family, and all the gifts will go to supporting programs of interest to students across the University.
It was a big day for philanthropy around the world, and I am so grateful that the Wesleyan family responded with such verve and munificence (can’t you tell I’m teaching a class on virtue)!
After the Black Friday and Cyber Monday advertisements have inundated us with calls to shop, shop, shop, let’s preserve some room in our heads to heed the plea of #GivingTuesday: give, give, give. Wesleyan is again participating in this global philanthropic movement, with the encouragement of a matching gift from the Frank-Kim Family. When 3,000 members of our Cardinal community give to Wesleyan for any purpose on or before Giving Tuesday, November 29, 2016, the Frank-Kim family will donate $300,000 for financial aid. You can find out how to make your gift here.
And while we’re in a generous mood, let’s remember our wonderful community radio station: WESU FM. I just received a request for donations from the current vice president of WESU, Ben Goldberg:
Thanks to everyone who has responded to our calls to action–we’ve made quite some progress with our current fall pledge drive. We have less than $7k to go, and we need your support to push us through to the end of this campaign. We can’t keep the station running without you, so know that your donation really does make a difference.
If you haven’t donated yet, now is the time. Community radio and alternative organizing are crucial right now, as they have always been. WESU is a truly special place, providing a platform for marginalized voices to be heard across the world. It is a place for hope, resistance, and change.
Through our incredible host of public affairs programs and music shows, WESU empowers people of color, indigenous populations, women, and queer folks to spread their own stories and messages that are often ignored in the mainstream media. Homegrown shows like Your English is Good as well our Italian programs serve communities that still use English as a second language. Syndicated programming like Pacifica’s Rising Up with Sonali and Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman have been providing powerful coverage on Standing Rock, The Climate Action Summit, police shootings and activism around the world. These are just a few examples of the important work WESU does to serve so many different communities.
Radio can be an incredibly powerful tool for both DJs and listeners alike, as I’m hoping you all have had the opportunity to experience. If you haven’t yet felt the power of community radio, keep listening–you’ll find it. Community radio matters. Independent media matters. WESU matters. Donate today! www.wesufm.org/pledge
We have much to be thankful for at Wesleyan, and many ways to contribute to organizations we care about. Let’s show that support between now at Tuesday, November 29th!
Across the country, many are calling for their universities to become sanctuary campuses. The model is the “sanctuary city,” like Austin, New York City, Chicago and dozens of other municipalities, which have declared their intention not to cooperate with federal officials seeking to deport residents simply because they lack appropriate immigration documentation.
Having spoken with students, faculty and staff over the last week, and having conferred with the Board of Trustees, I think it very important to declare that Wesleyan University is a sanctuary campus. For us, this means the following:
As we say in our webpages, we will continue to “welcome all undergraduate applicants regardless of citizenship status. Undocumented students, with or without Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), who apply to Wesleyan will continue to be treated identically to any other U.S. citizen or permanent resident in their high school.”
Through our alumni networks, we are also putting together legal resources for members of the Wesleyan community with questions concerning their immigration status. We will facilitate connections to these resources and other support services, as we work with appropriate offices and constituency groups on campus.
These are small steps, to be sure, in the face of a very frightening wave of threats to roll back the civil rights gains made in recent decades. But we will stand up and take these steps; we will do our best to protect our community, and we will gather resources to enable all its members, regardless of citizenship status, to continue to have opportunities to thrive here.
For several years now, Wesleyan students, faculty and staff have been working with incarcerated people in Connecticut state prisons. With all the post-election tumult, it is important to remember that there has been an emerging consensus from various parts of the political spectrum to end mass incarceration. Now there is political work to be done to ensure that “law and order” rhetoric not evolve into policies that continue to decimate communities of color while benefiting private prison companies. And there is educational work to be done. Wesleyan’s Center for Prison Education is bringing resources to incarcerated men and women who learn together with their teachers and mentors.
Recently the Ford Foundation awarded Wesleyan’s Center for Prison Education a $300,000 grant to continue its important work. The people at Ford recognized the dedication of the students who founded the program, along with the talents and energy of the teachers and supporting staff who bring a first-rate liberal education to men and women behind bars. This grant will allow us to continue to offer classes, and, in cooperation with Middlesex Community College, offer an Associate’s Degree.
Earlier this semester, I attended part of the Shasha Seminar, which this year was focused on problems of mass incarceration. I heard very moving accounts of working to get prisoners released and of the problems that folks face after they thought they were leaving a life behind bars. I talked with Wesleyan alumni who have been doing this important work for many years, and who now see possibilities for real change. But the most powerful talks I heard were from people who had committed serious crimes and then, through education, turned their lives around. Education, they explained, saved their lives, and now they felt a duty to help others who were struggling.
Isn’t this one of the great effects of liberal education? Experiencing the awakening of one’s own potential through learning, one wants to participate in the education of others. It’s a form of liberation, a way out of the mindset of incarceration.
I am grateful to the Ford Foundation for supporting our work at the Center for Prison Education. The dedication of the folks doing this work is especially admirable in these tumultuous times.
In my message to the campus on Saturday, I underscored that “Wesleyan will never retreat from our mission of creating an inclusive and equitable community. We are open to debate, to challenging ideas, but we will never back down in the face of crude bigotry.” Threats of mass deportation is one of the forms that crude bigotry has recently been taking, and this threat is totally at odds with our decision last year to treat undocumented applicants just like other applicants from the United States.
This weekend I have been asked by students and faculty about Wesleyan becoming a sanctuary campus, which means (at the very least) that we would not cooperate with any efforts at mass deportations. I find this a very promising direction, having said that “we will find ways to cultivate the values that sustain our educational community and protect the people who have made it their home.” In the coming days and weeks I will discuss this option with the appropriate offices and Trustees. I will report back to the campus on what we can do in this regard.
Inside Higher Education asked me for further thoughts in the aftermath of the election:
Like many university people, I kept underestimating the phenomenon of Donald Trump. Months ago, I called attention to “The Trumpian Calamity,” hoping that more college presidents and other education leaders would condemn his campaign of hate-filled demagoguery. Now, like so many around the country, I find myself wondering whether I should have done more.
My essay, parts of which come from earlier communications I’ve made to the campus, is here.
This morning I sent the following message to the Wesleyan community:
Dear friends,
In the past few days a few Wesleyan students have received racist, threatening messages. This is completely unacceptable, and the University will fully support anyone targeted by hateful messages of this kind. We will also deploy our resources, including appropriate law enforcement agencies, to discover who was responsible for sending any threatening messages. There will be accountability.
The public sphere in this country has been for months polluted with an outpouring of racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic rhetoric. The pain of targeted groups is real because the threats are real, and we must acknowledge those threats and work to stop them from infecting our lives and our campus. We must fight to protect people of color and religious minorities from violence driven by socially sanctioned scapegoating and bullying. We must ensure that our friends in LGBTQ communities are not marginalized by newly empowered narrow-mindedness taking control of our legal system. And we must ensure that our campus is free from threats emerging from vile ideologies and hate-filled hearts.
Wesleyan will never retreat from our mission of creating an inclusive and equitable community. We are open to debate, to challenging ideas, but we will never back down in the face of crude bigotry.
If you know of people who have been targeted, please support them and urge them to report online HERE.
This is a challenging time in our country and on our campus. By looking out for one another, taking care of one another, we will find ways to cultivate the values that sustain our educational community and protect the people who have made it their home.
Sincerely yours,
Michael Roth
President
For many years now, veterans have enrolled at Wesleyan or worked here as faculty and staff. Since the fall of 2014, we have cooperated with the Posse Foundation to bring cohorts of 10 undergraduate veterans to Wes each year. Here is the latest group:
You can learn more about the program here and here. Some of our Wesleyan undergraduate veterans are featured in this video:
Tomorrow we will have a “salute to service” just before our final football game of the year. Today is Veterans Day, and I ask that we pause and remember the men and women who have served our nation in uniform. They are family members, neighbors, friends, faculty, staff, alumni, and students. They deserve our acknowledgment and our gratitude.
This morning I sent the following message to the Wesleyan community:
Dear friends,
Early this morning when it became clear that Donald Trump would become our president-elect, my thoughts shifted from the good of the country to the good of the University. An international student here, and a friend, texted Kari to ask if the University would be alright. Yes, we will. This election has heightened feelings of alienation and vulnerability. The pain of targeted groups is real, and we must acknowledge it and work to mitigate its effects. But we will be alright because we will continue to strive to build the inclusive community that rejects white supremacy, bigotry and fear; we will be alright because we will express our care for one another in a context of fairness.
It just so happens that in my class on Virtue and Vice this week, we are focusing on how some artists retreated from the public realm after the crushing failures of the revolutions of 1848 in Europe. Around that time, Karl Marx wrote: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves.” But many great poets, novelists and painters grew bitterly ironic about making history and the possibilities of progress. Recognizing that there are no guarantees about who was going to end up on the “right side of history,” they became cynical about change, detaching themselves from any possibility for a meaningful work in the public sphere.
My friends, we must resist any temptation to abandon the public sphere to those who would return to a past in which people of color, women and queer folk were even more systematically excluded from access to basic rights. As engaged participants in the polity, we have to remain vigilant to protect the people and values we care about. This is not the time to close one’s eyes or to stop listening. We need more conversation across political and cultural differences – and we need new modes of engagement. Faculty, staff and students will be thinking hard about this in the coming days and weeks. We must continue to work to defend those who are disenfranchised and oppressed, and to create opportunities for greater numbers of people.
Cynicism and irony are too easy a response to disappointment. Regardless of political affiliation, we can work together—beyond the university—to solve specific problems and create opportunities. And here on campus, we will create a community that offers opportunities to all our students, staff and faculty to thrive, to be challenged, to be at home.
Michael S. Roth
President
The election season is finally coming to an end. I published this short essay at the end of last week in Inside Higher Education.
It was a debate moment that historians will surely return to — like Richard Nixon’s sweaty brow and George H. W. Bush’s impatient glance at his watch. When Donald Trump lost composure and interjected “such a nasty woman” (twice), the game was over. Respect for women? Please.
From mocking disabled people to stigmatizing immigrants to encouraging violence against one’s enemies, the Trump campaign has indulged in a startling variety of transgressions of normal political discourse. The Clinton campaign’s counterpoint “when they go low, we go high,” suggested by the extraordinarily popular first lady, seems to be more about political advantage than moral elevation.
Few people seem to be turning to college campuses lately for moral elevation. Videos go viral of undergraduates screaming their demand for a peaceful home, while deans make a virtue of their commitment to academic freedom by undermining their faculty’s ability to prepare students for disturbing content. Absolutist rhetoric circulates easily at our universities when they should be cultivating subtle analysis and nuanced interpretation.
Some have pointed out that coarse political discourse goes way back in American history and that Trump is following in the footsteps of other titans of transgression. Politicians have said the darnedest things for a long time, we are told, and the Trump campaign’s invective is not actually as unusual as today’s oversensitive onlookers like to claim. The same might be said of our campuses, which have long been hotbeds of contention.
Back in the 1970s there was a Saturday Night Live routine, “Point/Counterpoint,” in which Dan Aykroyd would turn to fellow commentator Jane Curtin and exclaim, “Jane, you ignorant slut.” The funny part of this bit was that it was hard to imagine anyone on a real news show ever saying something like that as a prelude to articulating a disagreement.
Over the last decade, however, we have grown accustomed to the rabid fulminations of talk radio and to cable news pundits cultivating personae of perverse aggressivity. And now we have been treated to the spectacle of political candidates commenting on penis size, assaultive groping and vicious denigrations of the physical appearance of women. Today the Dan Aykroyd line would not be so funny because it would not be so preposterous.
The expectation of excoriation has become a fact of public and academic life — with consequences in the civic realm. Disagreements — be they on social media or at the neighborhood watering hole — can get nasty very quickly. And it’s sticks and stones as well as words. Americans are killing one another at alarming ratesin disputes over everything from what to play next on the jukebox to the best car brands. A verbal shot can have an awful counterpoint when somebody has a pistol tucked into his belt — whether he’s in a bar or a classroom.
Although this growing barbarism is much remarked on in the political realm, when it comes to colleges we hear about a very different kind of concern: political correctness on campus. Somehow, the enforced niceness of PC culture is dangerous because it protects “coddled” millennials from having to challenge their own assumptions. While the rest of the country is engulfed in a dangerous war of words, campuses are accused of caring too much about triggering painful memories and providing safe spaces. This fantasy about PC culture has been weaponized in the current electoral campaign, so that all kinds of assaultive speech (and worse) are celebrated as evidence that candidates aren’t caving in to political correctness.
When you spend time on college campuses, however, you find plenty of debate that is actually substantive — about the role of systemic racism in our institutions, about the possibilities for meaningful work after graduation, about the struggle for transparency in our public institutions. Transparency in particular is a key value for many students across the country, and this often leads to controversy because privacy is also a value they cherish.
That said, undergraduates today are often repulsed by official politics, and they are too likely to be cynical about the possibilities for building responsive institutions that can support the most vulnerable or empower the most innovative. It’s been observed that they are no longer inspired by abstract calls for “free speech” or by warm and fuzzy talk about “diversity and inclusion.” No wonder nihilism seems to be making a comeback among those who want to show how sophisticated their suspiciousness has become. If you’re really smart, the thinking seems to be, you won’t believe in anything that promotes possibilities for change. “We won’t get fooled again!” is the defensive cry of those afraid of being disappointed if they seek to engage with anything beyond themselves and their immediate peer group. Disillusionment is harder to mock than idealism and is in great supply on our college campuses.
It’s less risky to undercut an opponent’s stand than to take a stand of one’s own, and mocking the commitments of others from a distance is the safest route of all. Proposing practical programmatic change in areas like refugee resettlement, mass incarceration, the minimum wage or gender equality may indeed lead to social media storms of abuse from the alt-right or from a holier-than-thou left. That doesn’t make the proposals bad or good, but it does make it easier to propose nothing at all.
What’s most worrisome about the normalized nastiness is that it will surely discourage even more people from participating in public life, regardless of political persuasion. Nobody likes being called a racist, a loser, a fascist or even a neoliberal. And nobody enjoys being the object of mockery that is eminently retweetable.
The solution isn’t censorship or pious calls for more civility. Nor is the solution “rising above it all” to a “know-it-all position” that is smugly pessimistic because it is “all so smart.” The solution is to keep engaging on issues and proposing ideas that address real problems with full knowledge that one will be attacked for doing so. Fear of attack is no excuse for the failure to take a stand.
We must not abandon the public sphere to those who have successfully polluted it. It has always taken courage to take a public stand, and courage is still the best counter to nastiness.
I drove up to Williamstown yesterday to see a stunning performance by the Wes Football team. Hats off to Coach Dan DiCenzo and his staff, and to all the athletes who made Wesleyan proud. One more game left in this season — next week at home against undefeated Trinity. It should be a good one!!
