Michael S. Roth '78

Spring Travels, Vacation Thoughts

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Kari and I have been on vacation this first week of Spring Break. We’ve returned to Paris, a city we both lived in when we were in our student years, and in which we have spent extended periods of time in the time since. Although this was not a Wesleyan trip, we spent a few hours at the Wesleyan-Vassar program here. It was great to meet some of the staff and talk with some students who are spending the spring semester in France. Studying in a foreign country, especially when you are immersing yourself in another language, can be such a powerful complement to a broad, liberal arts education. There are so many things you have to re-consider when you are living outside the US, not the least being your own views of home. One starts to see oneself and one’s culture through the eyes of others — usually a strong learning experience.

Our students in France are studying art history, politics, history and, of course, French literature. Some want to explore psychology, while others are attracted to geography, science studies and philosophy. All of these things are often grouped here under the rubic of “human sciences,” and recently there has been a reinvigoration of the term “humanities” in French. Kari and I went to hear the inaugural lecture of a new Humanities Institute in Paris, at the Diderot campus (Paris 7). The feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti made a strong case for a “post-anthropocentric,” integrative version of the humanities that would be as interdisciplinary as anything we have seen in the states.

We’ve spent much of the week seeing old friends, listening to music and looking at art. We heard about new trends in philosophy, and Kari was especially interested to learn about the important number of philosophers who are now investigating “the problem of the animal.” Her new book, Thinking Animals, is about to come out from Columbia University Press. We saw a wonderful exhibition on Matisse, in which the decisions the painter made when confronted with certain visual/cognitive problems were brought to the fore. This reminded me of how Tula Telfair has recently discussed her work. We also saw fantastic, disturbing exhibition at the Musée Branly, L’Invention du Sauvage. The English title for the catalogue is The Human Zoo, and the two titles together give a good idea of the subject matter: the creation and display of the colonial Other as exotic — even antihuman. This exploration of the genealogy of racialism and racism reminded me of Andy Curran’s recent book, Anatomy of Blackness. And I couldn’t help wonder what our dance faculty would think of the great exhibition on dance and the arts at the Centre Pompidou, Danser sa Vie.

It’s not as if I think only of Wesleyan when visiting Paris. I promise, nothing red and black came to mind when we saw the exhibition on Degas’ nudes!

We’ll soon be home to prepare for the rush of the second half of the semester. There will be music to hear, and exhibitions to see as the senior theses continue to unfold. And friends, new and old, to share stories of Paris with.

Lacrosse Openers a WOW!!

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As most students left campus in the last couple of days to begin March break, the sports teams were busy preparing for their upcoming seasons. The lacrosse teams’ competitions began today with our important Little Three rival Williams. Both Wesleyan teams emerged victorious! The women put on an amazing display here at Smith Field. Kaylin Berger ’13 scored 6 goals for the Cardinals, and Kayla Ellman ’13 had three goals and an assist. Our goalie, Maggie Drowica ’12, was just amazing in net as we built a big lead, stopping 11 of the first 13 Williams’ shots.

The men were up in Williamstown for their opener, and they downed the Ephs 9-4. Graham Macnab ’14, Joe Porcelli ’14, and Teddy Citrin ’12 netted two goals a piece, and Grant Covington ’12 had a great game in goal.

Meanwhile in the Midwest, jumpin Tommie Lark ’12 placed fifth in the triple-jump competition at the NCAA Championships. Tommie repeats as an All-American this year.

Go Wes!!

 

UPDATE:

Men’s Lacrosse, led another two goals from Teddy Citrin and two goals and an assist from Aidan Daniell, got by Hamilton 9-8. Grant Covington withstood a furious last quarter drive by Hamilton. The women’s lacrosse team gave nationally ranked Hamilton all it could stand, but fell 11-10 in overtime. Kaylin Berger added four more goals to her weekend total, and Liz Chabot ’12 added two scores.

Jefferson Ajayi ’13 was named an All-American wrestler at the Division III tournament this weekend. CONGRATULATIONS!

Listening to Wesleyan

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This morning as I was preparing my class, I smiled as I heard yet another report on the impact of campaign spending on the primary elections. The ads in this election cycle, the NPR reporter stressed, have been among the most negative we have ever seen. So, why was I smiling? The analysis was based on reports from the Wesleyan Media Project. Erika Franklin Fowler and her colleagues and students have been busy coding and analyzing data from around the country, enabling us to better understand the impact of big spenders, especially from SuperPacs, on our civic discourse. I wonder if our guest Thursday night will speak to this topic, and to the role of the Citizens United decision in creating our current political climate.

Over the weekend I heard a radio report about Paul Weitz’s (’88) new film, About Flynn. Paul is a proud Wes alumnus who has remained very connected to alma mater. He made a splash not long after graduation with the comedy American Pie (and later Meet the Fockers), and he has worked on animation films (Antz), television (Fantasy Island), and now written and directed the drama About Flynn. Paul also has had a hand in independent movies, online shows, documentaries as well as theater. His play, Lonely, I’m Not, is currently being cast for a run in New York.

On campus the season for senior theses plays and recitals is picking up steam. Sophie and I enjoyed Mao The Musical recently, Alan Rodi’s (’12) opera. When we return from Spring Break there will be a great series of performances by our soon-to-be Wes grads.

On Thursday, March 8 at 3:15 and 4:15, Professor Neely Bruce will lead two performances of The Bill of Rights: Ten Amendments in Eight Motets for two performances in the Wesleyan’s Memorial Chapel. You can read an interview with Prof. Bruce about his music here.

And don’t forget about AuralWes, the website about student music events/concerts on campus. The website is looking for good listeners who are also good writers.

 

Antonin Scalia and Political Diversity

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Next week Justice Antonin Scalia will be delivering the Hugo Black Lecture at Wesleyan. It’s been a long time since we’ve welcomed a Supreme Court Justice to Middletown. Justice Harry Blackmun visited the campus in 1993, giving the second lecture in this series. We’ve invited others, but given the busy schedule of the Court, we have not been able to arrange a visit. When Justice Scalia accepted the invitation, he said that he had heard positive feedback about the lecture series and Wesleyan from his former law clerk, Lawrence Lessig, who spoke here a couple of years ago.

I was very impressed by Justice Scalia’s comment. After all, everyone knows how far to the right Justice Scalia is, and Professor Lessig is pretty far along the opposite end of the political spectrum. It seemed to me a very good thing that these two men were in conversation about Wesleyan, and that Justice Scalia seemed to have respect and affection for a legal theorist with whom he undoubtedly differs on a slew of important issues.

Predictably, some faculty and students have objected to inviting to campus a public figure with whom they fiercely disagree. Less predictably, hundreds of Wesleyan students lined up to get tickets to the event (I wish we had more seats!). I suspect that this doesn’t mean they want to hear views they will find congenial. They want to hear a powerful advocate for a point of view that is having a decisive impact on the country. They want argument and disagreement — not an echo of their own thoughts. They want an educational environment.

Although as a citizen I have frequently found myself opposed to Justice Scalia’s views, as a professor and college president I am eager to hear them expressed in the setting of a public lecture. We need more vigorous debate on campus about political issues, and debate that does not just feature different views from the same sector of the ideological spectrum. We live in very polarized times, when differences of opinion quickly give rise to personal attacks on the one hand, and to retreats into like-minded groups, on the other. Sure, people may at first seek out others who share their strongly held views, but that kind of ideological and cognitive reinforcement is anti-educational.

Tucker Andersen ’63 is on the Wesleyan Board of Trustees. When I asked him to join, he expressed some hesitation because he did not know if his libertarian views and free-market advocacy would be welcome. He has been happy to support the university generously with his time and resources, and has often shared ideas with me on how to achieve our common goals for Wesleyan. But he was concerned that his political perspectives would create a distraction for the board as it pursued those goals. Despite the fact (maybe because of the fact) that we pretty frequently disagree on political matters, I told Tucker that we needed contrarian perspectives on the board. He has been a great board member, and I continue to benefit from his thoughtful point of view.

One of the questions Tucker asks me from time to time is how we can achieve more political diversity on campus. I haven’t found a good answer for him. It seems to many conservative observers that we are pretty homogeneous politically. We don’t seek out historians, critics, economists or scientists of one political persuasion or another, but we should be more aware of prejudices that might lead us to hire people whose political views reinforce our own. A certain amount of political prejudice is part of the culture of the campus — many take for granted that with education comes political commitment associated with the Left. This is a mistake. If we don’t recognize this mistake and try to correct it, we ourselves will be guilty of intolerance and anti-intellectualism. We will have no ground to stand on when faced with the arrogant, pseudo-populist ignorance we’ve been seeing recently on the campaign trail.

I often describe Wesleyan as representing the best in progressive liberal arts education. To truly be progressive, to develop programs that lead other institutions to learn from our example, we need to hear thoughtful voices from a variety of political perspectives. Although I consider myself a person of the Left, it is a serious error to think that all educated points of view will come from those who share our particular vision of critique, of progress, or of social justice. We should not welcome those who cannot tolerate difference, those whose views close down thinking and social interaction. But we should welcome dissent. Making the conservative or libertarian case at a liberal arts university like ours is a tough thing to do, and I admire those who try to do so.

By bringing intelligent conservative discourse to campus, we will increase our capacity to combat the idiot wind of know-nothing anti-intellectualism that is all too prevalent in our political culture. I am hopeful that Justice Scalia’s lecture and discussion will contribute to this capacity.

 

Wesleyan Wrestling Champions!

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Congratulations to Coach Drew Black and his mighty men for winning the New England Wrestling Association Championship. The victory was a true team effort, with Kyle Roosa ’13, Jefferson Ajayi ’13, and Luke Erickson ’12 taking divisional crowns. It was a real nail-biter, as the Red and Black seized the title by the narrowest of margins from defending champions Springfield College.

It’s been an exciting winter sports season for our Wesleyan athletes. Squash and track are still competing in tournaments, and I’m already looking forward to spring!

 

Why We Value Diversity

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This week the Supreme Court voted to hear a challenge to the ability of colleges and universities to shape the racial and ethnic demographics of their student bodies. Currently, schools are allowed to use race as a factor among many others in achieving diversity for educational reasons. When the Court hears Fisher vs. the University of Texas, we may find that the justices set strict limits on how universities can consider race in their efforts to create an educational environment in which all students learn — and learn from one another.

Here at Wesleyan, we have for many years emphasized creating a diverse student body because we believe this results in a deeper educational experience. In the late 1960s President Victor Butterfield led the school 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.

In our classrooms, students and teachers see the value of diversity throughout the semester. As David Kelley of IDEO and the Stanford Design School has noted time and time again, homogeneity kills creativity. The key to successful brainstorming and innovative teamwork is to have a multiplicity of perspectives. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman makes a similar point in his recent Thinking, Fast and Slow. Groups are beneficial for problem solving as long as they don’t degrade into following-the-leader; learning takes place when people bring a variety of perspectives to the issue at hand. If almost everyone is from the same background, you run the risk of substituting mere repetition for iterative cross-pollination.

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.

At Wesleyan our mission statement reminds us that we aim to prepare students “to explore the world with a variety of tools.” Diversity is an aspect of the world we expect our students to explore, turning it into an asset they can use. We expect graduates to have completed a course of study in the liberal arts that will enable them to see differences among people as a powerful tool for solving problems and seeking opportunities. We expect graduates to embrace diversity as a source of lifelong learning, personal fulfillment, and creative possibility. Selective universities want to shape a student body that maximizes each undergraduate’s ability to go beyond his or her comfort zone to draw on resources from the most familiar and the most unexpected places.

As the Supreme Court considers Fisher vs. the University of Texas, it is crucial that the justices continue to allow universities to consider race and ethnicity within a holistic admissions process that aims to create a student body that maximizes learning. 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.

cross-posted with Huffingtonpost

Creativity and the Curriculum

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For the last four years or so, we have been making a great effort to emphasize some of Wesleyan’s traditional strengths. For example, Wes students are known as having intense political concerns, and we have tried to find ways of making the curriculum more responsive to those interests. The Civic Engagement Certificate and many of the activities of the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship and the Center for Community Partnerships are helping our students find ways to make a difference in the public sphere. Provost Rob Rosenthal often speaks of the “engaged university,” and we are making progress in linking engagement with educational content.

Wesleyan students also are known for great creativity. Whether in Film Studies or Biology, the study of religion or the practice of artistic performance, Wesleyan students are innovative and productive. Nowhere is that more apparent than in musical performance. On Saturday night Jubilee was inspiring an audience in the Crowell Concert Hall, while in Memorial Chapel Aaron Peisner ’12 led a terrific chorus as part of his senior thesis work. Aaron had prepared choral music that spanned four centuries and several languages. The singers joined together in a labor of affection, intelligence and joy.

I’ve wanted to make sure that our curriculum is responsive to this energy from the student body. Last year I asked Charles Salas, Director of Strategic Initiatives, to think about how we should pursue the objective in Wesleyan 2020 of spurring creativity and innovation across the university.  He decided to focus on the disciplines represented in our curriculum.  The term “creativity,” of course, can be vague.  One department’s view can be quite different from another’s, so Charles met with a number of programs and asked them what creativity meant in their worlds and how they felt that they enhanced the creative capacities of their students. I hope many of you will read the full report, which gives a great sense of the discussions. Here’s the final paragraph, which gives a taste of what he found:

As for the discussions, I was struck by two things in particular.
(1) Regardless of how resistant faculty were to the subject of creativity in the beginning, it wasn’t long before that resistance dissipated. Faculty often remarked in the end that the discussions had been less predictable and more enjoyable than anticipated. It’s my estimation that faculty, in talking about their experiences in the classroom, found themselves in touch with their own passion for learning—itself a crucial if indirect contributor to student creativity. By modeling a passion for learning in the classroom, Wesleyan faculty spark the desire for such passion in their students—a desire that is necessary if students are to make use of the opportunity to develop their own creative capacities. And (2), many departments observed in passing that they viewed their seniors as more creative than their first and second-year students—observations indicative of the enhancement (purposeful or not) of student creativity across the curriculum.

 

Tournament Time — COME ON OUT TO CHEER!

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This afternoon and through the weekend, our swimmers will be competing here in Middletown at the NESCAC championships. Cara Colker-Eybel ’13 and Alexa Burzinski ’15 are having a great season on a strong squad. Our track and field athletes are in Massachusetts for the Division III tournament. All-American Tommie Lark ’12 has been jumping his way to a great season, and Heidi Hirvonen ’15 has been legging it out as if she were a veteran. The men’s and women’s squash teams are heading to the big tournament. The skills displayed by Tanesha Jackson ’13 and Grace Zimmerman ’13 are stunning, as is the tenacity of John Steele ’14 and Alex Nunez ’14. The hockey teams are facing off against Trinity this weekend. The women take to the ice in front of star goaltender Ashleigh Corvi ’13. The men are home on Saturday at 3:00 pm, charged up by leading scorer Nik Tasiopoulos ’14.

Tomorrow the women’s basketball team heads north for the NESCAC tournament, led by three seniors, Sam LaCroce ’12, Eileen Gaffney ’12 and Emily Lippe ’12. Right here in Middletown, the men’s basketball team enters the tournament with a full head of steam. The game against Bowdoin begins at 3:00. Let’s fill Silloway Gymnasium with lots of Wes fans as we cheer on recent player-of-the-week Mike Callaghan ’13 and the squad.

GO WES!!

 

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The Freeman Athletic Center was Rockin yesterday. Hockey had a big win, and the basketball team was a joy to watch as they stormed through the first round of the playoffs. In Springfield, LaDarius Drew ’15 was a star in the New England Division III indoor track championships, winning the 60m dash!

Still Plenty of Cold Weather, Why Not Think of Summer?

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Even in this mild winter, on Valentine’s Day with spring break still weeks away, I start thinking of summer. I know that the drop/add period just recently ended at Wesleyan, but it’s not too early to start thinking of the cool classes one can take at Wes and still have two credits completed before July 4th. The summer session here is a time to explore new subject areas or get some requirements completed in small classes with some of our great professors. The two Thematic Institutes this year are really exciting. These are two linked courses that tie different perspectives together on an important topic. Scott Higgins and Steve Collins are teaming up for an Institute on thematic storytelling. Scott will emphasize how Hollywood conventions enabled intense creativity by focusing on four classic directors: Frank Borzage, John Ford, Vincente Minnelli and Howard Hawks. Steve’s linked class will teach students how to write screenplays from the ground up, answering the question: “How do we write in pictures?”

The other Thematic Institute this summer is entitled Pathologies of the Mind. Matthew Kurtz’s class will be investigating the neuroscience of psychopathologies such as schizophrenia, bipolar illness, depression, attention-deficit disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder. His class emphasizing the biology of these disorders will be complemented by Jill Morawski’s course on cultural-historical perspectives on psychological disorders of thinking, mood, and life experiences. Together, these classes give students interested in psychology an extraordinarily multi-faceted approach.

Whether you’re interested in these institutes or computer science, government or creative writing, the Wesleyan Summer session has much to offer. Even just thinking about it makes me feel a little warmer…

Gilbert Parker, Wesleyan Theater Hero

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Tommy, Gilbert and Lin (Photo courtesy of Angela Christian)

This past weekend a stellar group of Wesleyan alumni gathered in New York to celebrate Gilbert Parker,who graduated in 1948 and has gone on to a distinguished career in theater. They were also celebrating the creation of a scholarship in Gilbert’s honor.  Tommy Kail ’99 and Claire Labine (Gilbert’s former client, creator/head writer of “Ryan’s Hope”) had the idea of creating a scholarship for Gilbert. Over 40 of Gilbert’s friends, many of them not affilated with Wesleyan, have contributed more than $100,000 to this fund. I couldn’t be in New York for the event, but I was able to send the following note: “The Parker Scholarship commemorates a rich history. You were the first graduate of our theater department. During your sparkling fifty-year career as an agent, the Wesleyan community took pride in your reflected glory.  You made this relationship with our alma mater deeper and more personal, then and following your retirement, by closely mentoring Wesleyan graduates in the theater world like Tommy Kail, Lin-Manuel Miranda, John Buffalo Mailer, and Bill Sherman, among others.  It’s wonderful that a group of your friends and protégés initiated this scholarship fund (and typical of your generosity, Gilbert, that you have contributed to it).”

It’s wonderful to honor the creative and generous spirit of an alumnus like Gilbert Parker. And I’m so grateful that we honor him by establishing a scholarship to support future Wes stars!