Michael S. Roth '78

Soccer Success

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The men’s soccer team made a much anticipated visit to Amherst yesterday. The Lord Jeffs were ranked 4th in the country, and the Cardinals 9th. Both teams are undefeated for the season and have been playing very well. We thought it would be a closely fought match, and in fact it ended with a 0-0 tie, even after two overtimes. Adam Purdy ’13, Wesleyan’s record setting goaltender, came away with an awesome performance for his 10th shutout of the year. Since Amherst and Williams fought to a tie earlier in the year, and Wes won its game against Williams, this gives us the Little Three Championship for the first time since 1992. Congratulations to Coach Wheeler and the entire team! Their last game is at home vs. Trinity on Oct 26 at 3 pm. I will be traveling for Wesleyan that day, but I hope we get lots of students there to cheer on the squad.

Can’t write about soccer without mentioning Laura Kurash ’13, who has been tearing up the field for the Cardinals. Laura has 13 goals for the season, which is 5 more than the rest of the team combined!! The Cardinal women are also playing Trinity on Oct 25. Come cheer them on, or check out the webcast!

Occupy Wall Street and Education

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Students have asked me about how I feel about the protests going on under the banner of Occupy Wall Street. I know several who have been participating in New York, and others who plan to join in during the fall break just about to begin.  Today I posted the following piece on the Huffington Post.

 

The Occupy Wall Street protests have become an important topic on college campuses. At Wesleyan, some of our students have joined the group in Zuccotti Park in New York, and others have found a variety of ways of expressing their support. Given the mainstream media’s treatment of the movement, it’s easy to mock the lack of clear policy initiatives or to roll one’s eyes at the absence of leaders to express a neat list of demands. But in talking with students and reading some of the statements from the Occupy Wall Street participants, it seems to me that we get a pretty clear picture of their discontent. Like many Americans, they are revolted by how huge infusions of money are corrupting our political system. And, they are aghast at the trajectory of increasing inequality.

There is plenty to protest. There is no question that our politicians now spend enormous amounts of time raising money; we all get the robocalls and the junk mail to prove it. And there is little doubt that elected officials make decisions about particular legislation or policy initiatives while considering how those decisions will affect the willingness of their donors to contribute. At least in this way, money is eating away at our increasingly dysfunctional political system. This is not something that other representative democracies accept as a necessary part of politics. We can try to show how the money flows – that’s been one of the tasks of the Wesleyan Media Project – but we don’t stem the tide.

Meanwhile, economic inequality in the country is accelerating in frightening ways. Here are three representative facts from Nicholas Kristof’s column from last Sunday’s New York Times:

The 400 wealthiest Americans have a greater combined net worth than the bottom 150 million Americans.

The top 1 percent of Americans possess more wealth than the entire bottom 90 percent.

In the Bush expansion from 2002 to 2007, 65 percent of economic gains went to the richest 1 percent.

Add to this that in many parts of the country 1 in 5 children are growing up in poverty, and you begin to have a sense of what is fueling the anger of protestors who feel they have to “occupy” public spaces in their own country – a country they feel is being stolen from them.

How have these trends concerning money and inequality affected life on a university campus? We can see it at either end of the college experience, beginning with access and ending with jobs after graduation. More of our students need financial aid than ever before, and they often need bigger scholarship packages to get through school. We also see the effects of rising inequality in the choices students face when looking for jobs as graduation nears. They hope to have had practical internship experiences to bolster their resumes while undergraduates, and they often worry that the first job they get after college will set them in an income bracket that will frame them for life. They worry that if their education doesn’t seem like job training, then it isn’t education at all.

But in the campus’s classrooms, concert halls, theaters and sports facilities, I see little evidence of the pernicious economic-political trends poisoning the country at large. That’s because the educational enterprise assumes a core egalitarianism linked to freedom and participation; that’s because as teachers we are committed to equality of opportunity for our students and to their freedom to participate as they wish in the educational enterprise. In big lecture halls, students can’t buy the best seats or arrange for extra help sessions with their parents’ checkbooks. In small seminars, there is a face-to-face equality altered only by the talent, ambition and creativity of the discussion participants. Differences often quickly emerge, but these are the differences of performance —  variations able to emerge exactly because of the environment of equality and freedom.

As a university president, I do spend a lot of my time fundraising. And I am grateful for the generosity of alumni and foundations who support our financial aid and academic programs. But I am also a professor, and this support has no impact on my teaching role or on the role of my colleagues in the classroom.  Now I know that this will strike some readers as impossibly idealistic.  After all, some of our students  have had great help along the way, while others have had to struggle alone. Some come from wealthy families, others from backgrounds of poverty. There is  no doubt that some students are better prepared than others, and that some of that preparation was facilitated by wealth. Still, in the campus culture at schools like Wesleyan, these advantages of birth or luck don’t mean much over time. In order to learn, you have to park your privilege at the classroom door. In order to teach effectively, we try to ensure that our students have an equality of opportunity that doesn’t erase their differences. Furthermore, in those schools that have protected the autonomy of professors, students come to see intellectual freedom modeled by their instructors in ways not dependent on wealth.

When inequality is a charged political problem, as it is right now in the United States, it is because efforts to scale back disparities of wealth are seen as an assault on freedom.  Increased state power is often needed to redistribute wealth, and many (and not only those with the money) see this as the growth of tyranny. Of course, increased state power is also used to protect wealth, which creates its own assaults on freedom. Universities and colleges are lucky insofar as they still have an ethos of equality that is linked to freedom in the classroom and around campus. You don’t need strong central power to ensure this. That’s why efforts to control speech with university regulations, are rightly seen (by either the Left or the Right) as anathema to the educational enterprise.  But graduation into a world in which inequality is ever more powerful comes as a rude awakening.

The campus as a place of equality and freedom has deep roots in America, at least as far back as Thomas Jefferson.  Even with all his prejudices, he favored education at the public expense to prevent the creation of permanent elites based on wealth who would try to turn the government’s powers to their own private advantage. Jefferson believed strongly that given the variability in human capacities and energy there would always be elites —  his notion of equality was an equality of access or opportunity not an equality in which everybody wins. But he also believed strongly that without a serious effort to find and cultivate new talent, the nation’s elites would harden into  an “unnatural aristocracy,” increasingly privileged, corrupt and inept.

From Jefferson to our own day, we have preserved the belief that education allows for the experience of freedom as one’s capacities are enhanced and brought into use. The author of the Declaration of Independence wanted university students to make these discoveries for themselves, not to be told to study certain fields because their futures had already been decided by their families, teachers, churches or government. Jefferson saw education as a key to preventing permanent, entrenched inequality.

Citizens are feeling they have to “occupy” the public spaces of their own country because they believe their land is being appropriated by entrenched elites. The call to “occupy”  is very similar to the Tea Party cry to “take back” our country. Can we find a way to take the experiences of freedom and equality we find in education at its best and translate them to the sphere of politics and society more broadly without at the same time increasing governmental tendencies toward tyranny? Of course, higher education has its own dilemmas of fairness and of elitism, but that does not absolve us of the responsibility to connect in positive ways what we value in research and learning to our contemporary political situation.  To make these connections productive, universities must at the very least serve as models: they must continue to strive to be places where young people discover and cultivate their independence and must themselves resist the trends of inequality that are tearing at the fabric of our country.


Wes Ruling the (Tech) World

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I was headed into New York this week for some alumni meetings, and everybody was talking about an article in this week’s Observer and Betabeat about the Wesleyan impact on digital media companies in the Big Apple. I’m reminded of Vanity Fair’s saying that this little Connecticut university dominated Hollywood, or how Spin and the Village Voice talked about the Wes-Williamsburg axis dominating independent contemporary music.

It’s very cool to see the work of the Wes family recognized. Here’s the Observer article by Wes grad Ben Popper ’05:

 

How Wesleyan’s Counter Culture Came To Rule New York’s Tech Scene

The offices of Zelnick Media were packed on a recent evening for #DigitalWes, an alumni gathering for the graduates of Wesleyan University who had made their way from jam bands and cultural theory to the warp-speed world of Silicon Alley. Guests nibbled shrimp and steak skewers while taking in a sumptuous view of midtown Manhattan from the roof deck. The hosts were Strauss Zelnick and his partner, Jim Friedlich, both class of ’79, whose Take Two Interactive has produced some of the best-selling and most controversial video games of the past decade.

“It’s the kind of school, if you told people you wanted to end up at Goldman Sachs, they would probably chase you out of the dorm,” said John Borthwick, class of ’87, a double major in developmental economics and art history and co-founder of the Chelsea-based betaworks. “Radical transparency, open access to information, disrupting traditional media, these were the secret handshakes at Wesleyan.”

The term Wesleyan Mafia has long been used to describe a cadre of graduates in Hollywood: successful directors, studio heads and writers. In music, too, graduates of the small liberal arts college in Middletown, Conn.—about two hours from New York—have had unusual critical success that stirred talk of a Connecticut Cosa Nostra. But it’s less surprising to hear that Michael Bay and MGMT attended Wesleyan, since the school is well known for its film and music departments. While computer science has never been among Wesleyan’s specialties, alumni seem to have found an especially prominent place of late among Silicon Alley’s elite. (Disclosure: the author graduated from Wesleyan, though he’s hardly among the elite just yet.)

At the party Mr. Borthwick clustered with Andy Weissman, his co-founder at betaworks, and Stuart Ellman, co-founder of RRE Ventures. RRE is one of the biggest investors in New York, with 29 portfolio companies in Silicon Alley backed by some of the $850 million they have under management. Mr. Weissman is a venture capitalist as well, having in fact recently left betaworks to join Union Square Ventures, New York’s most well-known venture fund and one of the top performing V.C. shops in the nation. The three firms have partnered on a number of high-profile seed stage investments in New York, and RRE is a backer of betaworks.

It’s the countercultural lessons learned at Wesleyan that laid the foundation for the alumni’s success in Silicon Alley, they said. “The forefathers and mothers of the internet came out of the ’60s ethic of distributed information and power,” Mr. Borthwick said. “There is an organizing ethic, which is why I suspect you see fewer Wesleyan grads at companies like Facebook, which has a very centralized view of the world.” Sure, he built and invested in promising companies like chartbeat, bit.ly, tumblr, kickstarter and GroupMe. But Mr. Borthwick began his career as a idealistic dot-com pioneer, keen to marry the worlds of art and the web, who produced avant garde websites like äda’web, total NY and Spanker.

Fred Wilson, New York’s most prominent investor, is an M.I.T. graduate, but his co-founder at Union Square Ventures is Brad Burnham, Wesleyan class of ’77. Mr. Wilson was in the next room over, chatting with Chris Dorr, class of ’74. “Filmmakers and software developers need to be sleeping together, and it is starting to happen,” Mr. Dorr declared. Outside on the roof deck, Mr. Wilson’s daughter, currently a sophomore at Wesleyan, talked about preparing for her semester abroad.

Betabeat bumped into Adam and Todd Stone, a pair of twin brothers whom we remembered as Stone and Stone, a comedy duo that mixed dirty jokes with Broadway show tunes. Their act had always been a sort of amplified, absurdist version of Borscht Belt humor performed by what seemed like the living essence of Scarsdale Jewry.

“We tried the whole Hollywood thing, but the people out there didn’t work for us,” Adam said.

“Now we’re thinking about trying our luck in the tech scene,” said brother Todd, who was finishing up a stint as an intern at Business Insider, where he had penned the massively successful slideshows: Ten Sexiest Programmers and Ten Sexiest VCs.

Would their new start-up have any connection to their act, The Observer asked? “We’re still working on that, but it will be something we’re passionate about,” Adam said.

“Either that or twin porn, which seems to be really big on the Internet,” Todd concluded.

The crowd settled to a dull murmur as Wesleyan president Michael Roth stood in the center of the room. A former professor known for his jazz piano skills and formidably tight jeans, he was making his first foray to the tech event . “All across this country, the notion of a liberal arts education is under attack,” Mr. Roth declared. “But looking around this room tonight it’s clear to me that the skills we teach are becoming increasingly relevant in the digital age.”

Digital Wesleyan was not, of course, started as an networking effort on the part of the university. “This isn’t Harvard or Stanford—we’re actually really bad at organizing these kinds of alumni events,” Mr. Borthwick noted. “But the young Wesleyan people in tech, they’re popping up fucking everywhere.”

The events were in fact the initiative of a young graduate named Jake Levine. Betabeat found him huddled with Union Square’s Brad Burnham, debating the best way to keep the Internet free from corporate interference.

“It’s not always in the interest of the incumbent players to innovate,” Mr. Burnham explained. It’s a topic he knows firsthand, having begun his career at AT&T, a company notorious for eating its young when it comes to disruptive technologies. There Mr. Burnham, a decade older than his alumni peers, helped to build AT&T Ventures, a shop charged with the difficult task of finding promising new technologies within the strictures of a recalcitrant monopoly.

Mr. Levine had just finished reading Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks and began asking Mr. Burnham for more insight. “I never heard such a clear, concise explanations of how patent law encourages and stifles innovation,” he declared.

Mr. Burnham shook his head. “What I envy about someone like you or Benkler is the clarity of thinking. It’s like an early Maoist. You know where you want to go and don’t concern yourself with the obstacles along the way.”

The younger set at the event comprised mostly entrepreneurs, who are just as numerous, if not as powerful yet, as Wesleyan’s tech investors. Mr. Levine was working as an analyst at The Ladders when he began organizing Digital Wes. Early this year he was offered a spot as an entrepreneur-in-residence at betaworks, and four months later took a job as general manager at News.me, the social reader from betaworks backed by The New York Times.

“The people in this room where the ones who gave me my first advice,” said Dina Kaplan, co-founder of blip.tv. “At the time we started, none of us had run a business. We just had a vision for something we believed in.”

Jordan Goldman, whose acceptance to Wesleyan was chronicled in the New York Times best-seller The Gatekeepers, found funding for his first company by cold-calling the Wesleyan alumni network. “There is a very deep base here that young entrepreneurs can tap into,” confirmed Mr. Goldman, founder of Unigo, an online college guide that just raised $1.6 million from McGraw Hill. “These were the folks that got me started.”

Mr. Goldman was showing Christopher Lake, ’05, around the party, pointing out the various big names he should meet. Mr. Lake had just left an analyst position at McKinsey to try his hand at business development in the start-up world. “It’s a real eye-opener, especially compared to some of the Wes alumni at finance events I attended,” Mr. Lake said. “You’d meet a few investment bankers, a few hedge fund guys, none of whom you’d ever heard of, along with a gaggle of recent grads trying to break into the world. In that scene you get the feeling that Wesleyan will always be an also-ran. In tech, we’re distinct.”

In the elevator heading home, Betabeat met Kai Bond, from Hatch Labs, who had been chatting with several of the investors in attendance. Typically the process of finding funding for a start-up is a challenging one. Investors like to rake a new project over the coals before they commit capital. But for better or worse, the Wesleyan connection seems to have streamlined that process. “When you come to an event like this, it’s not, ‘Pitch me your idea,’” Mr. Bond noted. “It’s more like, ‘Come in for a meeting and let’s find an idea we can get behind.’”

 

Essays on Living With the Past

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Very exciting news for me today. A new collection of my essays arrived at Broad Street Books. Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living With the Past has just appeared from Columbia University Press (http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14568-8/memory-trauma-and-history). Some of the essays, like those on the history of medical thinking about memory disorders, date from several years ago. I wrote others, like those on photography, critical theory, and liberal education, since returning to Wesleyan as president. It’s a thrill to see them collected in this volume, especially with the cover image by my friend David Maisel, a wonderful California photographer. You can see more of his work at: http://davidmaisel.com/.

Thinking Photography with Diane Arbus and Errol Morris

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My review of Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus and Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography appeared in today’s Washington Post. I’ve been teaching and writing about photography for several years, and at Wesleyan have found colleagues especially knowledgeable about the medium and its history. Jennifer Tucker writes about images and science, especially in the Victorian period, Andy Szegedy-Maszak is eloquent on photographs and our knowledge of the ancient world, and Claire Rogan does a marvelous job of making Wesleyan’s own photo collection come alive in exhibitions and catalogues. My interest in photography began as part of my study of how people make sense of the past, and in my new book, Memory, Trauma and History,  I have included essays that examine how photographs change the ways we think about recollection and knowledge.

Each spring since coming to Wesleyan I’ve taught a course called The Past on Film that deals mostly with how some classic movies teach us about core issues in the philosophy of history. This year I am planning to integrate some discussions of photographs into the course, as I did when I first started teaching the class.

Here’s the review:

 

Diane Arbus made arresting, absorbing photographs of dwarfs, twins, giants, nudists and carnies. “I really believe,” she said, “there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.” Together with other artists expanding the boundaries of photography in the 1960s, she altered the way we understand portraiture and thus the way we see people. She was criticized, most notably by Susan Sontag, for providing the cheap thrills of gazing at freaks. She was applauded by casual viewers, collectors and her fellow artists for turning the idea of the outsider into a compelling investigation of the possibilities and limits of representing otherness — of picturing people with whom connections are never simple, always frayed. The images stopped us in our tracks and stayed in our minds.

In “An Emergency in Slow Motion,” William Todd Schultz rushes toward Arbus convinced of the viability of psychobiography, of using general research findings in psychology to make sense of individual lives. He has written on madness and creativity, and on Truman Capote; in this book he discusses Sylvia Plath and Kurt Cobain, to name just some of the troubled stars who grab his attention. He professes modesty, talking of truth as a direction, not a destination, and of not being able to resolve the mysteries that are part of any complex personality. His goal “is to make sense of Diane Arbus’s psychological life . . . the subjective origins of the pictures themselves.”

Alas, “An Emergency in Slow Motion” doesn’t provide a convincing account of the subjective origins of the pictures because Schultz gives no indication that he has looked closely at them or done the basic research about how they were made. The book is handicapped by having no illustrations whatsoever — perhaps he couldn’t get permissions from the famously controlling Arbus estate. His descriptions of the important images or the process of making them are vague and uninformed. Schultz simply relies on the comprehensive exhibition catalogue “Revelations,” Patricia Bosworth’s 1984 biography and a handful of supplementary sources. Aside from a few interviews, he seems to have done almost no primary historical research and little reading in the history of photography.

Schultz does use a wide range of psychological theories. As if they were varieties of pasta, he throws them against the Arbus “case” to see what might stick. At times this is so trite as to be comical: “There’s a personality dimension Arbus was unusually high in, a so-called ‘artist type.’ ” He tells us she was high in “O,” which means she was “open to experience.” He tells us that Arbus’s picture-taking “was very psychological.” “What is it about these pictures? Like Plath’s ‘Ariel’ poems, they are decidedly not nice.” Right.

The perfect antidote to Schultz’s uninformed banalities about Arbus’s pictures is Errol Morris’s detailed explorations of photography’s connection to the real world. Morris is a great documentary filmmaker who has expanded the limits of that genre, and in recent years he has been blogging about photography for the New York Times. The chapters of “Believing Is Seeing” are taken from those blog posts, which show the author doggedly investigating entrenched assumptions about photographers and their pictures. Can one tell if Roger Fenton moved cannonballs around for dramatic effect in his pictures from the Crimean War? Was Sabrina Harman really smiling over a dead body in Abu Ghraib, or was it a “just say cheese” smile? Did Walker Evans add his own alarm clock to a documentary picture of a fireplace?

Facts matter to Morris, as he proves by doing basic detective work. He engages in archival research, he interviews experts, and he presses skeptically against theories and assumptions. He prides himself on “a combination of the prurient with the pedantic,” and the mixture works just as well in this book as it does in his films. Facts matter in the way that photographs matter: They tell us something but never reveal the whole story.

Photographs edit reality; they conceal even as they reveal. But Morris doesn’t rest at this level of generality. He wants to determine how this picture edits a particular reality, how that photographer tends to conceal certain aspects of reality in order to highlight others. Morris asks whether a photograph can document reality, function as propaganda and also be art. His answer is a resounding yes. The mysteries of photography stem in part from its never being able to tell the whole truth but almost always having something to say about the ways things were.

Morris tells us that his questions about the relationship between images and reality began with photographs of his father, who died when Errol was 3 years old. He has no memories of his father, but he does have images. In the chapter on documentary photography, Morris comments movingly on an Arthur Rothstein Depression-era photo of a father and his two sons seeking shelter in a dust storm. By interviewing a historian who tracked down one of the boys years later, Morris understands how the picture came to define how one of the sons viewed himself and his family. A photograph “brings time forward, but also compresses it, collapses it into one moment.” It is a moment that is found in the image but lost to the present: “Eternally trapped in the present, we are doomed to perpetually walk ‘in front’ of the past.” Photographs remind us of what cannot be seen anymore.

Morris’s book is beautifully designed, underscoring that visual evidence has its own texture, its own feel. Like Arbus, Morris knows that photographs gratify some of our deep cravings, but also that they also never fully satisfy. A photograph “partially takes us outside ourselves” and “gives us a glimpse . . . of something real.” This is a key part of what Arbus and Morris are both after.

Photography’s preservation of traces of the past offers the possibility that “we too can be saved from oblivion by an image that reaches beyond our lives.” By paying such close and caring attention to traces of the past, Morris greatly increases the possibility of their living on. He shows us what it means to do the hard work of saving memories from oblivion.

 

The Center for the Humanities — Thriving into the Future!

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Wesleyan just announced a very generous 2 million dollar challenge grant for our Center for the Humanities from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The challenge for us will be to raise another $4 million for the Center’s endowment. Rising to that challenge will strengthen Wesleyan’s leadership role in creating programs in the humanities, broadly conceived, that advance scholarship while making a deep impact on the lives of students.

Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities began as a place for scholars, artists and public intellectuals to develop their ideas with support, encouragement and without the disruptions of their normal working routines. Hannah Arendt worked on Eichman in Jerusalem at the Center, and C.P. Snow revised his thinking about the “two cultures.” Stanley Cavell’s The Senses of Walden developed there, as did Gayatri Spivak’s work on the subaltern. John Cage presided over many a conversation in the Center’s early years, and while I was a student the Director Hayden White brought in one extraordinary thinker after another. The current director, Jill Morawski, has kept the Center at the leading edge of important interdisciplinary scholarship. This term the focus is on how facts are constructed and recognized in a variety of fields, and next semester the Center’s Fellows will deal with the role of affect in the political sphere. Future projects at the Center will tie directly into pedagogy as well as research, and I’m very excited about that. The grant will also allow us to expand our reach into public life and to promote collaborative projects on and off campus.

While I embrace any opportunity to strengthen Wesleyan, this challenge grant has a special feel for me.  As an undergraduate, I attended the Center for the Humanities lectures with devotion (if not always comprehension). I loved the atmosphere of experimentation, boldness and rigor that I found there. I wrote my senior thesis as a student fellow at the Center, and it became my first book publication.  Later, as a young professor, I started the Scripps College Humanities Institute with Wesleyan’s Center as my model.  My undergraduate advisor Henry Abelove invited me to lecture at the Center, and it was very moving to stand behind the podium in Russell House that I had so often looked up to from the audience.

Faculty and students here today often tell me how valuable their time at the Center has been for their scholarship, teaching and learning. I’m never surprised. With help from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the generous Wesleyan donor community, we will be able to enhance the work of interdisciplinary humanities work for many years to come!

 

Innovative University

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This past weekend the trustees were in Middletown for their annual retreat. Our theme this year was “the innovative university,” and we worked together to think through how Wesleyan might get out in front of some of the major changes in higher education. Technology, of course, is driving many of these changes, as is a strong desire (for many) to lower the cost of education while making it more vocational. In this context, how could Wesleyan preserve and build upon some of its great traditions of scholarship and learning while also creating opportunities for new modalities of education in the future? How do we expect student learning and faculty research to change over the next decades, and in what ways can Wesleyan contribute to making those changes as positive as possible? These were some of the broad issues the Board discussed with faculty, staff and student representatives.

We have been using Wesleyan 2020 and a strategy map that complements it as a framework for allocating resources and planning the future of the university. We have three overarching goals that animate all our other objectives: to energize Wesleyan’s distinctive educational experience; to enhance recognition of the university as an extraordinary institution; to maintain a sustainable economic model. At the retreat we talked about a number of possible innovations that would be “disruptive” — that would change the platform for the educational experience of students. These ranged from significantly changing the time to degree, to collaborating with other institutions for joint programs, to adding many more online opportunities to our curriculum. I am particularly interested in how we can contain the cost of a degree while simultaneously offering every student opportunities to participate in the arts, athletics, internships, and independent research. There is no doubt that doing all this while maintaining our capacity to support original work by faculty will be especially challenging. But it is a challenge we take on because of our belief that the deepest educational experience depends on the scholar-teacher model.

Like many of the trustees, faculty, and students present, I left the meeting thinking that the urge to streamline education to meet some imagined vocational standard was a big mistake. At many other institutions, under the guise of “innovation,” calls for a more efficient, practical college education are likely to lead to the opposite: men and women who are trained for yesterday’s problems and yesterday’s jobs, men and women who have not reflected on their own lives in ways that allow them to tap into their capacities for innovation and for making meaning out of their experience. Under the pretense of “practicality” we are really hearing calls for conformity, calls for conventional thinking that will impoverish our economic, cultural and personal lives.

Hearing the passionate dedication of our trustees, I felt energized to rethink how we might change Wesleyan while remaining true to its core values. The mission of universities focused on liberal learning should be, in Richard Rorty’s words, “to incite doubt and stimulate imagination, thereby challenging the prevailing consensus.” Through doubt, imagination and hard work, students “realize they can reshape themselves” and their society. At Wesleyan, we recognize that challenging the prevailing consensus can actually enrich our professional, personal and political lives. The free inquiry and experimentation of our education help us to think for ourselves, take responsibility for our beliefs and actions, and be better acquainted with our own desires, our own hopes. Our education contributes not only to our understanding of the world but also to our capacity to reshape it and ourselves. That may be the most profound innovation of all.

 

 

Diversity and Transformation

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On Friday, in New York, the president of Middlebury and I co-hosted a meeting of liberal arts college representatives about diversity and innovation. It was an exceptionally stimulating gathering, facilitated admirably by Susan Sturm and Freeman Hrabowski. Susan is the George M. Jaffin Professor of Law and Social Responsibility at the Columbia University Law School, where she also directs the Center for Institutional and Social Change. Freeman has been president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County for 20 years and is widely recognized for his success in steering African American students into research and professional positions in the sciences.

Provost Rob Rosenthal and VP Sonia Manjon joined me at the meeting. The discussions made it clear how important our diversity work is for some of our major initiatives. For example, we have been adding resources and leadership strength to our civic engagement programs over the last few years; now we  must ensure that all our students have opportunities to work in community, find productive internships, and generally translate their education into practical terms off campus. We recognize that inclusion and difference are important to the success of civic engagement; now we must turn that recognition into specific goals for tapping into the strengths of our diverse community.

Over the last few years we have also been emphasizing the role of creativity and innovation throughout our liberal arts curriculum. At the meetings in New York, it was clearer than ever to me that we must leverage the creative spark that comes from having teams of heterogeneous students, faculty and staff. At Wesleyan we have become adept at celebrating difference; now we must become better at finding ways to turn the different perspectives we bring to projects into forms of creative energy. This is less about personal identity than it is about harnessing the productive synergies that come from bringing together folks from different backgrounds with different points of view.

For Wesleyan to continue to thrive in the long run, we must show the relevance of a liberal arts curriculum to students from diverse backgrounds around the world. In our scholarship, teaching and co-curricular activities, we must make this education relevant as a resource to those concerned about the future shape of higher education. By embracing the transformative power of diversity, Wesleyan can help shape the future of higher education rather than just react to the emergent cultural and economic conditions for colleges and universities.

Review of Manufacturing Hysteria

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The following book review appeared in this past Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle. There are many faculty and students here at Wes interested in the problematic history of surveillance in our country. I’ll just mention here historian and American Studies professor Prof. Claire Potter’s original and important take on J. Edgar Hoover. You can find it on WesScholar:

http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/div2facpubs/21/

 

Manufacturing Hysteria

A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America

By Jay Feldman

Manufacturing Hysteria offers a chilling overview of how American political culture has generated domestic enemies to justify massive infringements of rights. Jay Feldman begins with the World War I era and charts how the federal government (and often the states) developed bureaucracies of surveillance that often spilled into mob violence of the worst sort. He shows how the government “protected” democracy by systematically attacking those whose beliefs departed from official positions, thereby undermining the very political culture it was supposedly protecting.

What it means to be a patriot has changed over time, but Feldman sees how the urge to define “untainted Americanism” has persisted from the hysteria around German immigrants during the First World War to fears of a fifth column – be it made up of Russian Bolsheviks, Japanese saboteurs or Islamic terrorists. In 1919 the Washington Post applauded “serious cleaning up” of “bewhiskered, ranting, howling, mentally warped, law-defying aliens” and “international misfits,” and in subsequent generations we find parallel support for official, well-muscled efforts to make us feel safe by finding an internal enemy that can be attacked.

Feldman emphasizes two salient dimensions of this curious process of generating security by feeding paranoia. The first is that these efforts themselves violated the Constitution they claimed to be defending. Again and again, our elected officials (and the bureaucracy that shores up their power) have used extralegal means to pursue enemies. And they did so knowing they were violating the law or exceeding their authority. They often conjured up a sense of crisis to justify their actions, but Feldman does a good job of showing how their elaborate security designs were developed well before any emergencies actually occurred. These were well-planned efforts to ensure that future crises wouldn’t go to waste – that the government would be in a position to use them to increase political homogeneity.

The second dimension that Feldman emphasizes is that the insecurity was illusory, that the hysteria was “manufactured.” He does indicate, very briefly, that in times of prosperity, such as the 1920s, the propensity to create ideological or ethnic purity through violence is much reduced. But he does not examine how threats – such as the existence of a real world war or the work of spies who are really gathering information on behalf of a well-armed foreign power – might change security issues. Feldman notes that after hundreds of thousands of investigations of private citizens, there were few prosecutions, but he mistakenly concludes that this means that there never were any real security threats.

The communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy period are for Feldman the paradigm for America’s “neurotic nightmare.” He doesn’t see the relevance of the communist tyranny in Asia and Europe, a form of oppression willing to murder millions, and he is silent about the tactics of the American Communist Party – from its embrace of the Soviet alliance with Nazi Germany to its willingness to accept the mother ship’s mass persecutions of dissidents. Instead, Feldman opines that it was communism’s “powerful critique of the social inequities of the capitalist system … that made the Communist Party so threatening to the established order.” But he gives no evidence at all that it was a “critique” J. Edgar Hoover was worried about.

And Hoover, longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is at the heart of “Manufacturing Hysteria.” Hoover’s obsession with dissidents of all kinds, his reckless abuse of the Constitution, his power over lawmakers turned feelings of suspicion into policies of surveillance and control. The internment camps for Japanese Americans were just the tip of the iceberg; given the right conditions, Hoover was ready to round up millions. The FBI’s thousands of informants were in the field to discredit civil rights organizations and antinuclear groups – anyone who might depart from the narrow band of mainstream American life.

Alas, Feldman does not explore Hoover’s motivations, or why this man so desperate to conceal his own private life from scrutiny became a master of intruding into the lives of his fellow citizens. The author rarely digs beneath the political surface, and his focus remains stubbornly on conventional, mainstream American history. Do other republics (or political organizations) also create political scapegoats? Of course they do. How does the American example compare to the French, or the British? What about socialist countries and their manufacture of hysteria to shore up those with power? Unfortunately, one learns nothing in this book about how modern political regimes of various kinds are prone to the hysteria that has also infected the United States.

Feldman’s focus on American political elites is meant as a cautionary tale, and his epilogue describes how much worse things have become in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. “Manufacturing Hysteria” is a political book, aimed at reminding those dedicated to civil liberties (especially the right to dissent) how fragile our freedoms are and how “close to a police state” we have come over the last century.

In his preface, Feldman writes: “Now, as ever, vigilance is required if liberty is to survive.” He does not seem to recognize that many of those whose “hysterical” actions he deplores could have written this very same sentence. We can be grateful for his account, while still being disappointed that he did not explore what drives officials here and in other countries to believe that in periods of great insecurity the rights of some should be sacrificed to protect their own particular version of freedom.