Michael S. Roth '78

Campus Conversations on Fraternities

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For the last few years, the issue of sexual assault on college campuses has received intense national and local attention. As the scale of the problem has become more widely recognized, many institutions have taken steps to improve their preventative and disciplinary procedures. At Wesleyan, we significantly revised our sexual assault policies and have focused on three kinds of activity: supporting survivors; punishing assailants; and changing the culture so as to eliminate elements that lead to assault. Bystander intervention is an important facet of most of our efforts in this area. The role of student activists has been crucial to the changes we have made, as has input from faculty, staff, parents and alumni.

As I wrote in the summer of 2013, sexual assault is, among other things, a problem of equity and inclusion. Fear of assault reduces educational opportunity. Sexual assault, I said then, “has rightly become a major issue for educators who want their campuses to be safe places at which all students can experience the freedom of a transformative education.”

Over the past few months the place of single-sex, residential fraternities at Wesleyan has been at the forefront of our discussions, in large part because of the large campus social spaces controlled by all-male organizations. On April 18 an impressive list of students and faculty published a call to action in the Argus demanding that our three all-male residential fraternities “choose to co-educate and drastically reform their societies to be welcoming and safe organizations and spaces for students of all genders.” Two days later the Wesleyan Student Assembly passed a resolution that put a time-frame to this demand: that our fraternities demonstrate “a clear and swift plan of action… beginning with an initial co-educated pledge class in spring 2015.”

The issue of fraternities attracts strong emotions “for and against,” but I’ve been pleased to see that most discussions of the issue here – be it in public forums, letters published in the Argus, or emails to the president – have been conducted in ways that aim at shared understanding. On our campus these issues are complex, and we have a variety of organizations. For example, at Wesleyan we have co-educational societies that have a fair amount of autonomy and, in some cases, residential space. These societies claim the same feelings of community and solidarity that the all-male fraternities prize.

On a campus that so fully embraces coeducation across all aspects of our lives, the presence of single-sex fraternities raises questions about our commitment to gender equity.  And although it is obvious that not all sexual assaults happen in fraternities, there are strong questions raised about fraternity culture and what researchers call “proclivity” to discrimination and violence. While the fraternities have made it clear that they wish to be part of the solution, it’s also clear that many students see fraternity houses as spaces where women enter with a different status than in any other building on campus, sometimes with terrible consequences.

Many of our peer institutions have entirely eliminated “exclusive societies” like fraternities, while a few others have charted different paths. I’ve already made clear to the residential fraternities that we will not accept the status quo. We have informed them that they must allow Public Safety the same level of access required of any other student residence. Failure to agree to Public Safety access will put an end to that fraternity’s existence as a student residence, and given the fact that the owners of the buildings have not yet agreed to this expectation, students now slated to live in fraternities (including Alpha Delta Phi) should make contingency plans with Student Life.

It’s up to all of us to create the kind of campus climate we value, and it’s become very clear that fraternities, as presently constituted, pose challenges to that ongoing effort.  I expect to make a further announcement with respect to the role of fraternities on campus after consulting with trustees at the Board meeting in May. Meanwhile, I‘ll continue to listen to and learn from a variety of perspectives on how to create the best residential learning environment we can.

 

Congrats Baseball, LAX, Track Stars

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The Wesleyan baseball team once again won the Little Three title this weekend, taking 2 of 3 from Amherst. This left the Cardinals atop the NESCAC West division moving into the playoffs. THISISWHY!

Speaking of playoffs, the mighty men’s lacrosse team beat Connecticut College to advance to the semifinals of the NESCAC tournament. We face Amherst Saturday at Tufts University, with the winner going on to play for the championship the next day.

LaDarius Drew ’15 kept his winning ways at NESCAC men’s track championship this past weekend, winning the 200 meters and the long jump. LD also finished second in the 100 meters. Agbon Edomwonyi ’16 was a standout in the hammer throw and the shot put. I think it was the history/philosophy/literature classes that gave them the jump on the field….

Speaking of the hammer and shot, Sierra Livious ’16 placed in these events and another at the NESCAC women’s championship. Ellie Martin ’16 finished an incredible close second in the 400m race.

Congrats to all our athletes finishing up their spring seasons! Go WES!

 

Supreme Court Decision Undermines Education and Opportunity

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I just posted this on HuffingtonPost and thought it would also be relevant to many in the Wesleyan community.

 

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. As I describe in Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, 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 the American rhetoric of equality into genuine opportunity. And throughout our history elites threatened by equality, or just by social mobility, have often 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 universities and to limit the number of Jews who enrolled. And in 2006, the citizens of Michigan passed an amendment to the state constitution banning consideration of race at their universities, undermining opportunity for minorities in the state.

This week the Supreme Court voted to uphold the rights of these citizens to forbid race-sensitive admissions policies. Previous Court decisions had allowed schools to consider race among other factors, but this judgment affirms the voters’ right to overrule university policies. Under the guise of democracy and supporting the political process, the Court has allowed States to close off opportunities for those who would benefit from them the most.

As Justice Sotomayor argued in her dissent, in Michigan you can now lobby those who control admissions to pay more attention to how many alumni relatives applicants have, and you can urge the deans to recognize how much money these relatives might give the school after applicants graduate. But you can no longer successfully advocate making the universities in Michigan more racially diverse — even if the governing boards recognized that a more diverse campus benefits everyone on campus.

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 schools 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.

At residential universities, homogeneity in the student body undermines our mission of helping students develop personal autonomy within a dynamic community. That’s why we are eager to welcome students from various parts of the United States and the rest of the world to our campuses. That’s why we ask our donors to support robust financial aid programs so as to ensure that our students come from a variety of economic backgrounds. A “dynamic community” is one in which members have to navigate difference — and racial and ethnic differences are certainly parts of the mix. All the students we admit have intellectual capacity, but we also want them to have different sorts of capacities. Their interests, modes of learning, and perspectives on the world should be sufficiently different from one another so as to promote active learning in and outside the classroom.

Creating a racially 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 under-represented groups for whom a strong education will have a transformative, even liberating effect. Education, as Douglass said, makes you unfit for slavery.

The federal government has often had to step in to ensure that states provide access to political and economic opportunity. As Justice Sotomayor put it in her dissent, in the past the court ruled 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.”

But this week’s ruling allows states to forbid university officials from considering race when determining access to higher education. When seen in the context of recent decisions undermining voting rights, it’s hard not to think that we are witnessing elites, “scared almost to death,” holding onto their privileges by limiting access to social mobility and economic opportunity.

Jefferson’s “unnatural aristocracy” is working hard to increase its advantages, but at universities we must recognize our responsibility to provide real opportunity to those groups who historically have been most marginalized. 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.

It would be an enormous step backward to force our admissions offices to retreat to a homogeneity that stifles creative, broad-based education. We must find ways to protect the diversity (racial, economic, cultural) that has become absolutely crucial to the dynamism of our universities, and to lives of learning and opportunity.

Richard Slotkin to Inaugurate Lecture Series

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When I was a student here in the mid 1970s, I remember all those the smart kids who hung around Richard Slotkin, a young faculty member teaching literature, film, history, anthropology, cultural studies….or so it seemed to me from the buzz I heard about his classes and his scholarship. I remember sitting in the audience for a Center for the Humanities lecture based on his Regeneration Through Violence, a study that injected energy and purpose into the growing field of American Studies. Over the years Richie was one of the paragons of our scholar-teacher model: a beloved professor who was shaping the field of American Studies.

When I came back to Wesleyan as president, I asked Richie for advice about teaching large film classes (he was the master of this, as you can see from his iTunes class on Westerns), and he also gave me an earful on how the administration could do a much better job on any number of fronts. It was classic Slotkin: smart, engaged, and ready for real conversation. His retirement was a real loss for Wes (I keep asking him to come back to teach a course or two), but it has been a boon for readers who care about imagining the past. Check out his Amazon page, and you will find novels, history books, essays… He’s the real deal.

This week Prof. Slotkin is inaugurating a lecture series that has been created in his honor. His talk is entitled: “Thinking Mythologically: Black Hawk Down, the “Platoon Movie,” and the War of Choice in Iraq.” Here’s how Joel Pfister, who chairs American Studies, puts it:

Come see the amazing founder of the Wesleyan American Studies Department–Richard Slotkin–in action, THURSDAY, APRIL 24, 4:15, POWELL FAMILY CINEMA.  Professor Slotkin was a member of the English Department, began the American Studies Department (when he was in his mid-twenties), and helped establish the Film Department, and was one of Wesleyan’s most popular and beloved teachers (the first professor to win Wesleyan’s Binswanger Teaching Award twice).  He has not only written history, he has made it.  Since his early thirties he has been internationally acclaimed as one of the greatest American Studies scholars and he played a foundational role in developing the analysis of empire and race in the field of American Studies.  He taught hundreds of students each year in his movie courses on “Westerns” and also on war movies.  In December he was interviewed about gun control on Bill Moyers’ PBS show and before that has been interviewed by the major networks on gun culture and movies (for instance, re-reading the Star Wars films as extensions of the “frontier myth”).

This should be a great event. Come hear one of Wesleyan’s truly remarkable scholar-teachers on Thursday afternoon.

 

In College, Choose to Thrive

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I originally wrote this op-ed for the McClatchy-Tribune, and it has appeared in various newspapers over the last week. I then read Arianna Huffington’s new book, “Thrive,” which argues for a different “metric of success” — something harder to quantify than traditional measures, but potentially much more fulfilling. Might there also be such metrics that would help one match up well with the college at which one would receive an education that would lead to lifelong learning? The idea of lifelong learning is at the core of my new book, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, which Yale University Press is bringing out in a few weeks.  I’ve posted this on the HuffPost site, and it seems appropriate to re-post here the week of WesFest.

Many of us were delighted by high school senior Kwasi Enin, who made the news recently when he was admitted to all eight Ivy League universities. He announced, with a great grin, that he would revisit the schools to find the best fit given his interests in music and medicine. He also wanted to compare their financial aid packages.

Kwasi’s success story is a rarity, but his response is not. After the thick envelopes arrive at home (or, after you click on the happy web link that announces your acceptance), students have about a month to really think about what kind of school would help them grow as a person, what kind of school would best prepare them for the future, and at which school would they be happiest. And they also have to think about whether they can afford the school of their choice.

The Ivies, and most of the country’s highly selective universities, promise to “meet full need” if you are accepted. That means that the colleges offer robust financial aid programs, and in recent years many have put a cap on required student loans. If household income isn’t high enough to pay the otherwise steep tuition, these schools will waive all or a large part of their bills.

But how does one answer the other questions about which school is the best match? Some young people are attracted to large universities with intense school spirit and a dizzying array of offerings. But apart from the big parties and athletic rivalries, many of these institutions are focused on graduate work and research, with undergraduates being taught mostly by part-time instructors. Others are attracted to smaller, residential schools with discussion-based classes led by scholar-teachers. But some of these institutions will feel too confining or isolated for students who want a high-energy, urban experience.

Many students today seem to think they should pick the university at which they will acquire the credential that will land them the most highly paid job. This is a sad (and ultimately impractical) narrowing of what a college education should provide. Sure, one should leave college with the ability to compete for gainful employment. But that first job should be the worst job you’ll ever have, and your undergraduate years should prepare you for more than just entry into the workforce.

Your college education should prepare you to thrive by creating habits of mind and spirit that will continue to develop far beyond one’s university years. Thriving means realizing your capabilities, and a liberal education should enable you to discover capabilities you didn’t even know you had while deepening those that provide you with meaning and direction. A strong college education, one infused with liberal learning, helps create what philosopher Martha Nussbaum has called “new spaces for diverse possibilities of flourishing.”

Discovering these possibilities for flourishing is the opposite of trying to figure out how to conform to the world as it is. That’s a losing proposition, not least because the world is changing so rapidly; tomorrow it won’t be how it is today. When you flourish, you find ways of shaping change, not just ways of coping with it. Those who get the most out of college are often anti-conformists aiming to find out who they are and what kind of work they will find most meaningful. They are not ready simply to accept someone else’s assignment. Those who get the most out of college expand the horizons in which they can lead a life of meaning and purpose.

These, I realize, may sound like awfully highfalutin’ phrases to someone trying to decide big school or small school … lots of requirements or open curriculum … great campus social life or wonderful experience off-campus. And you do want to be able to compete successfully for that first job.

But your college choice isn’t just about “fit” and “comfort”; it isn’t just about the prestige of the school or the amenities it offers. Your college choice should reflect your aspirations, where you can imagine yourself discovering more about the world and your capacities to interact with it. The college you choose should be a place at which you can thrive, finding out so much more about yourself as you also discover how the world works, how to make meaning from it and how you might contribute to it.

I wish Kwasi well as he returns to visit those lovely campuses. I hope that he, and the many thousands of other students across the country making college decisions this month, will use their imaginations to envision how they might flourish in their college years in ways that will enrich and inform their lives for decades beyond the university.

 

A Passover of Peace, a Celebration of Freedom

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At Beckham Hall tonight many Wesleyans will join in the first Seder meal that marks the beginning of Passover. You can find out more information about the holiday on campus here. Our family gathered at my brother’s house yesterday for an early Seder, which was filled with the pleasures of breaking matzot together (and eating my matzah ball soup, my only culinary achievement). We talked of politics and education, family stories and sports. And we all marveled at our newest family member, baby Ruby, who reminded us all of how much joy one can get from simply getting another person smile….even giggle.

Part of the Seder is a reflection on the idea that if oppression and slavery still exist, then none of us are really free. At our Seder table, we talked about this in regard to the Palestinians and the Ukrainians, and in regard to the numerous ways in which violence continues to undermine freedom in so many places closer to home.

I hadn’t yet heard of the shooting in front of the Jewish Community Center in Overlook Park, Kansas. Three people were killed in the attack, according to press reports; all three were Christians devoted to family and community. The alleged shooter taken into custody is said to have ties to Nazi groups. He has long been a hate monger with a strong anti-Semitic and racist reputation. As Jay Michaelson wrote in the Forward: “Overland Park should issue a wake-up call. Oppression against one minority is oppression against all. And we Jews should not forget.”

None of us should forget: Oppression against one minority is oppression against all. As we strive to make our own campus community a place of peace, let us remember to struggle against oppression wherever we may find it.

Whatever tradition you belong to, why not use this week to think more about how we can contribute to ending oppression, making our communities places of peace.

Music, Theater, Athletics This Weekend!

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This weekend the senior theses shows keep coming. I missed the opening this week because of NESCAC meetings, but I’m eager to see the work of the studio art seniors at the Zilkha Gallery (up through Saturday). There are recitals (e.g., Simon Riker’s ’14 musical in Beckham, Jeffrey Berman ’14 and Molly Balsam ’14 in the CFA) and plays (Lily Whitsitt ’06 production of Vatzlav), and I hear a rumor about a great musical in the 92 Theater. And I’m sure there’s more!!

There’s also plenty of sports action. The baseball team has been on a tear. Last weekend there was a very exciting sweep of Middlebury, and this weekend the Williams team comes to town on Friday afternoon. The softball team has been lead by pitching ace Su Pardo ’16, who was named Player of the Week by NESCAC after heroic efforts. In track, Kiley Kennedy ’16 has continued her record setting ways in pole-vaulting, while Sierra Livious ’14 set a school record in the hammer throw. The Women’s lacrosse team is on the road this weekend, and they are getting stronger as the season progresses. The men’s lacrosse team has excelled, and they defend their first-place record this weekend against Bowdoin. The mighty crew teams will be up at Tufts, showing how pulling together really works.

It’s such a busy time of year, and I know I haven’t listed anything like a full report on goings on. But let’s cheer on our Cardinal mates wherever we find them: on the fields, stages, galleries or vaulting with a pole!

And congratulations to all those thesis writers who finished up today. THESISWHY!

 

How to Choose a (Our) University

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The happy emails and web links have gone out (replacing those thick envelopes), and all those fortunate enough to have choices about what college to attend will make a big decision: picking the college that is just right for them. They are trying to envision where 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.

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. There are some schools with larger endowments that can afford to be even more generous than Wes, but there are hundreds (thousands?) of others that are unable even to consider meeting financial need over four years of study. Our school is expensive because it costs a lot to maintain the quality of our programs. But Wesleyan has made a commitment to keep loan levels low and to raise tuition only in sync with inflation in the future. We also offer a three year program that allows families to save about 20% 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 Middlebury?

Knowing that these schools all provide a high-quality, broad and flexible curriculum with strong teaching, and that the students all have displayed great academic capacity, prospective students are trying to discern the personalities of each school. They are trying to imagine themselves on the campus, among the people they see, to get a feel for the chemistry of the place — to gauge whether they will be happy there. That’s why hundreds of visitors come to Wesleyan each week and why there will be the great surge for WesFest. They go to classes and athletic contests, musical performances and parties. And they ask themselves: Would I be happy at Wesleyan?

I hope our visitors have gotten a sense of the personality of the school that I so admire and enjoy. I hope they feel the exuberance and ambition of our students, the intelligence and care of our faculty, the playful yet demanding qualities of our community. I hope our visitors can 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.

Whatever college or university students choose, I hope they get three things out 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:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LzN8sGkRXg#t=23[/youtube]

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 the fields in which they work. The commitment of our faculty says a lot about who we are, as does the camaraderie around the completion of senior projects that we are seeing right now on campus.  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 enchant many of our visitors, too.

Sexual Assault Awareness Month

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I sent the message below to the entire campus community a short time ago. I am looking forward to conversations in the coming weeks with students who are involved in sexual violence prevention work, students involved in bystander intervention, and an open session with the WSA on Sunday, April 13th. There are also education and training opportunities being offered to faculty and staff and I encourage attendance at those events.

 

April is “Sexual Assault Awareness Month.” The problem of sexual violence on college campuses around the country – including our own – has received a great deal of attention in the press these past months. Although every report is painful, the problem is made worse when it’s hidden away. I’ve been impressed by the students here who are speaking out about it on their own.  They understand that the problem of sexual violence is not one that can be completely resolved by some administrative “fix.”  For that, we need the commitment of the whole community.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, between 20 percent and 25 percent of women will experience a completed or attempted rape during their college years. Is this appalling statistic true of Wesleyan? We will be using survey tools to better understand the problem here as well as making every effort to encourage survivors to report incidents.  And we will continue to make clear that we have no tolerance whatsoever for sexual violence.

In addition to supporting survivors and creating a clear, effective process for adjudicating these incidents, we have been developing initiatives such as the Bystander Intervention Program that have a proven record of effectiveness.  And because offenders often use alcohol to exploit potential victims, our work also includes efforts to shift norms around alcohol use. Any groups that are found to encourage binge drinking will be sanctioned or disbanded.

I recently wrote about these and other measures we are taking to address sexual violence. In the coming year you will be hearing much more about this issue and that of gender equity on campus from our Title IX Officer, Antonio Farias, and a standing Title IX Policy & Education Committee that includes students and trustees is actively addressing short- and long-term aspects of the issues. The increased discussion of sexual violence this month (and beyond) may be distressing to members of our community personally impacted by the issue, and I would like to remind them that Counseling and Psychological Services at the Davison Health Center provides a number of resources, including individual counseling and support groups.

For my part, I will be meeting with various student groups this month, including the WSA and students involved in sexual violence prevention, to discuss what more we can do to eliminate this form of violence from our community. I find myself thinking through (often in the middle of the night) steps we might take that will rid our campus of these awful attacks. Input from students and faculty is most welcome.

Take Back the Night this year is on April 24 – and I hope you will join me at this event where individually and collectively we can express our commitment to creating a climate in which sexual violence has no place. Together, we will continue our work to make the Wesleyan campus the inclusive, secure and equitable community we know it can be. This is a vital, long-term project. Together we can do this; it is up to us.

Beyond Vegan: Long Lane Farm to Raise Bison

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As many of you know, the Long Lane Farm has been very successful at selling organic vegetables to our food services vendor, Bon Appetit. This means we are eating local, and we are eating healthy! Furthermore, students are gaining valuable experience in managing a farm and understanding how a small operation can make a big difference. Well, that difference just got bigger!

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Next year, Wesleyan students will be raising bison right here in Middletown. We tried raising chickens on the farm a few years ago, and I know that we had unhappy results. So, after crowd sourcing an innovation agenda on sustainable edibles, we decided to scale up with animals that are less fragile. This will be meat that comes from local animals raised with care (and organic feed). The herd will benefit from the beautiful meadow just adjacent to the farm…cross country runners will now have something really interesting to gaze at!

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The idea comes to us from the bison farm at Amherst, Massachusetts, where hipsters know that locally curated meat is the answer to the Omnivore’s Dilemma.

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…but don’t worry about this being a Trojan bovine. Although we won’t try to breed red heifers, we will make sure that our bison love the cardinals. Imagine bringing one of the creatures out at half-time at Homecoming!

GO WES!!