Michael S. Roth '78

Recognizing Academic Achievement: Slotkin, Hsu, Fins

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In the last few days I heard about three major academic awards garnered by members of the Wes family. The first went to an emeritus faculty for a lifetime of scholarly contributions; the second went to a recent graduate whose achievement and promise are remarkable by any standard; the third went to an alumnus and former trustee whose work on medical ethics is having a profound effect on his professional and our public life.

This past weekend Richard Slotkin (Olin Professor of English, Emeritus) was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This society, founded during the revolutionary period, has as its mission “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honour, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” Richard Slotkin is one of the founding figures in American Studies, and his work on politics, popular culture and myth has played a decisive role in shaping our understanding of how the idea of the frontier shaped American self-consciousness. A cultural critic of insight and wit, he has also written novels, such as the recent The Crater. At Wesleyan he helped create the American Studies Program and was a stellar contributor to Film Studies. Richie has long inspired students, faculty and readers, and you can see his film class on Westerns at iTunes University.

Chia Wei “Wade” Hsu ’10 has won the LeRoy Apker Award of the American Physical Society for his extraordinary undergraduate work in physics. Wade graduated in the spring after four years as a Freeman Scholar. He was a member of Francis Starr’s theoretical/computational physics group, and, as Brian Stewart recently told me, rapidly established himself as a force of nature, publishing five papers while an undergraduate, including a paper each in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA and Physical Review Letters, the most prestigious journals in physics. Wade received the award by competing against students from Ph.D.-granting institutions.  That means that Wade was chosen over students from, among other places, Harvard, Caltech, MIT and Princeton. Francis Starr calls him the “best of the best.” While at Wesleyan, he was also involved with the East Asian Studies Center, studied languages, tutored and played lots of music. Wade has begun his graduate work at Harvard this year. (I hope he’s not too bored.)

I met Joe Fins when he served as a trustee on the presidential search committee in 2007. Joe is a COL grad who has served alma mater with energy and distinction. He is also a physician and professor of medicine, authoring more than 200 publications in medical ethics and health policy. Joe was just elected to the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine, powerful recognition of his remarkable contributions. He is a professor at Cornell Medical College, President-Elect of the American Society for  Bioethics and Humanities, a Governor of the American College of Physicians  and a member of the Hastings Center Board of Trustees.

We know there is great work being done all around the campus. It’s especially gratifying to see these accomplishments recognized at the highest levels!

[tags]academic awards, Richard Slotkin, Chia Wei Wade Hsu, Joe Fins[/tags]

Young Profs Making a Difference in the Public Sphere

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Just a quick addendum to my last post on participation in the political sphere. This weekend two of our young professors in the social sciences weighed in on important national/international issues in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. In an OpEd for The Los Angeles Times, Laura Stark, who teaches sociology and is part of the Science in Society Program and the College of the Environment , explained how the current research review system in the United States remains inadequate. On the heels of a US apology for dangerous and cruel medical research in Guatemala, the US now has on opportunity to overhaul ethics rules. Stark makes specific recommendations as to how we can avoid both the steamrolling of subjects and an echo chamber of assent on ethics review panels.

As I drank my morning coffee and read the New York Times on Sunday, I saw Erika Franklin Fowler’s research with the Wesleyan Media Project cited once again. In this instance, she was discussing how China has become the scapegoat for many desperate candidates in this election cycle. Fear of China’s recent economic progress seems to have re-ignited traditional anti-Chinese racism, and many political advertisements are tapping into this cauldron of hate and anxiety.

Political scientist Elvin Lim continues to offer trenchant analysis and thoughtful opinions on his blog, Out on A Lim. Today he wondered if President Obama has been too quick to back down when challenged by a forceful opposition. He concluded his reflections on transformations in White House staffing by saying: “There can only be as much change as that which the president himself ultimately believes in.”

How much change do you believe in? Whatever you hope to see happen in the public sphere, I hope you will be inspired by our young social science faculty and get engaged!


Participation in Fall Politics

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Wesleyan students are known as a political group, and often this means that we have been the scene of plenty of campus activism. I’d like to think that as an educational institution we develop capacities for citizenship in our students (and not just the capacity for protest), and that we have a culture in which people take seriously ideas from various points in the political spectrum. Sometimes schools like ours are criticized for being too homogeneous politically, and we should recognize that we have often been a place that has marginalized conservative voices. In recent years I have sensed a change in that regard, as groups of students who identify as conservatives have organized and gained more of a presence on campus.

Now we are little more than a month away from national elections, and we are being bombarded with advertisements. Since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that deemed money to have the protections of speech, the pace of “investing” in the political arena through large donations has accelerated. The Wesleyan Media Project, under the guidance of Prof. Erika Fowler, is tracking these expenditures and getting a lot of attention in the press. Who is trying to influence us, and for what purpose?

All of this mass media politicking can seem like so much noise after a while, and there is a tendency to tune out. I want to remind the Wes family, especially our students, that this is precisely the time when you should be paying the most attention to politics. I want to remind our students, whatever their political affiliations, to get their absentee ballots or arrange to vote here in Middletown.

Please don’t neglect political participation because of some general dissatisfaction with the whole system. It would be a terrible waste if our campus community became merely skeptical about politics and didn’t participate. If you don’t exercise your power to vote, someone else will be making decisions for you.

[tags]politics, vote, Wesleyan Media Project[/tags]

Virtuous Circle of Teaching and Research

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Over the last thirty to forty years, higher education in America has viewed contributions to research as an essential part of its mission. Professors are expected to participate in shaping their scholarly fields, and students are expected to learn not just the wisdom of the past, but how to produce knowledge in the present. At large universities, though, the research function often seems to dwarf the dedication to undergraduate education. At several of the Ivies and other schools that compete for academic prestige, senior faculty often have little to do with teaching those preparing bachelor degrees, and graduate students or other part-time instructors wind up taking on the bulk of college teaching. The tenured professors work mostly with graduate students, preparing them for careers that, too, are expected to center on research.

In recent years the folly of this system has become increasingly evident: there are few tenure-track jobs for the graduate students being trained to work in the most specialized domains, and undergraduates are often left to wonder how courses taught by these narrowly trained specialists are supposed to connect to their lives after college. As smaller institutions emulated the research universities, the publish-or-perish mentality became a core part of faculty culture, with specialized journals publishing for small groups of colleagues offering the most professional prestige.

There has recently been plenty of strong criticism of the cultivation of esoteric research in higher education. Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus have argued that universities are wasting resources and failing students, in part because of the premium put on faculty research rather than teaching. Hacker and Dreifus have been teaching in New York for decades, and they have also been prolific authors. But in their recent book,  Higher Education? they argue that schools have been distracted from their core educational mission by adding on the obligation to contribute to scholarly fields.

Mark C. Taylor, Wesleyan graduate, long time professor at Williams and now Chair of the Religion Department at Columbia University, has recently published what he calls a bold plan to respond to the contemporary crisis on campus. Noting how the focus on research has driven a wedge between faculty and student interests, he diagnoses “the identification of specialization with expertise.” Narrow specialization should be the great enemy of educators because it leads to silos of inquiry with little opportunity for surprising intellectual exchange. But specialization has gone hand in hand with professional prestige, something that schools have been chasing for decades.

Taylor’s main argument is that our overspecialized colleges and universities are increasingly divorced from the hyper-connected world defined by “webs, not walls.” Networks of interconnectivity rather than isolated expertise are defining our world, and higher education will become obsolete if it doesn’t plug into these new forms of knowledge creation. (I’ve taken my comments here from my review of the book in the LA Times.)

How are these critiques relevant to Wesleyan? To be sure, our university prizes research because we believe that it informs and enlivens pedagogy. I often talk about the “virtuous circle” of teaching and research, and many of my Wesleyan colleagues have been deeply affected in their scholarly work by what they learn from students in the classroom. Similarly, our students know that we continue to learn with them through the work we do in our fields…we are not just imparting information to them that somebody else imparted to us.

Some of Wesleyan’s best teachers are also our most serious and original researchers, and all of us remain dedicated to undergraduate education even as we produce scholarship for specialized audiences. So, even though I think Hacker, Dreifus and Taylor are right to worry about severe overspecialization (with its associated bureaucracy) in certain fields, I think they might say more about the positive feedback loop that can connect the classroom and the archive, the science lab and the lecture hall. And we should note that these contemporary critics of education are themselves also researchers, and this hasn’t seemed to undermine their professed love of teaching.

I just attended part of the Molecular Biophysics and Biological Chemistry retreat, and I saw great evidence of how well the scholar teacher model is working here at Wes. This year’s gathering honored David Beveridge, Joshua Boger University Professor of the Sciences and Mathematics. David’s pioneering work in computational biology and biophysics has had a powerful influence in the classroom and the research lab, and I saw several fine examples of Wes student research in the poster session. Sure there is specialization, but there is also an understanding of what is at stake in the experiments and an ability to describe the work for the non-expert. Showing a wonderful talent for translating their efforts to this layman, students explained to me their work on RNA, on modeling the structure of particular carbon based molecules, and on the translation of proteins. My head is still spinning!

There are plenty of things in American higher education that can be improved, but we must be careful to preserve our ability to educate students broadly and deeply by engaging faculty in projects that are both scholarly and pedagogical. Specialization without the capacity for translation (without “intellectual cross-training,” as Wes trustee Geoff Duyk calls it) does undermine effective teaching at many schools, but Wesleyan professors who remain active scholars, scientists and artists exemplify a love of learning that can be made powerfully relevant to their undergraduate students.

[tags]research, specialization, Mark Taylor, David Beveridge[/tags]

Wesleyaning into the Future!

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Last weekend the Wesleyan Board of Trustees was in town for its annual retreat. The trustees, almost all alumni along with several parents of Wes students, gathered this year to focus on two major topics: building the long-term economic health of the university, and imagining how Wes will look 30 or 50 years from now. We were joined by faculty, staff and students, and the discussions were animated and productive.

On Saturday we looked at the general profile of the endowment — past, present and future. There are three key ingredients to building an endowment strong enough to provide annual revenue for the operations of the school: gifts, spending, and investment performance. Over the last three years we have shifted our fundraising priorities so that we now invest more of the gifts we receive rather than spending them, and we have reduced the percentage that we draw from the endowment. Finally, we have hired Anne Martin, formerly a Director in the Yale Investment Office, to provide wise stewardship of our investment portfolio. Anne led the retreat participants in some exercises that explored how we choose the asset classes in which we invest, and how we choose managers within those classes. Everyone left with a greater understanding of how our investment operation works.

We also discussed endowment fund raising at some length, since all trustees are active friendraisers and fundraisers for the university. Chair Joshua Boger led us in some creative exercises in which we thought about our highest aspirations for Wes and how we might envision taking steps to act on them. One trustee suggested that we find a way over the next decades to do so much good for our students and the world that Wesleyan becomes a verb!

This week we had our inaugural faculty meeting of the year. Department chairs introduced more than a dozen new professors who are joining our ranks across all divisions. These are extraordinary scholar-teachers who have already begun making their mark. Listening to the descriptions of their research and the classes they are teaching filled me with confidence in the ongoing rejuvenation of our curriculum and of our ability to shape scholarly fields through original contributions.

I was Wesleyaned!

[tags]Board of Trustees, endowment, Anne Martin, Joshua Boger, fund raising[/tags]

Sharing our Loss: Nora Miller

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Late this morning I sent the following message to the campus community:


Dear Friends,

It is with great sorrow that I inform you that Nora Miller, a Wesleyan student from the class of 2012, died late Monday afternoon. Nora was a film major of great talent and energy, an athlete of distinction, an engaged contributor to our community, a devoted friend and a loving daughter and sister. Her parents, Jeff and Patricia Miller, are former Wesleyan employees close to many here. We have offered to help the Millers in any way we can.

Our hearts go out to Nora’s family and friends in this terribly painful moment. When someone takes her own life, the entire community is shaken. I have no doubt we will be more mindful than ever of those who are suffering around us, and, I trust, we will console one another and take care of one another. Student Affairs staff have been providing support to some of Nora’s friends. I encourage anyone who is seeking help to speak to the Office of Behavioral Health for Students (always available via the 24 hour on-call system 860-685-2910) or to one of our class deans.

We will soon begin working with Nora’s friends and teachers on an appropriate service on campus.

We grieve for Nora, and we grieve with her parents, sisters, friends. May we find some consolation in making our memories of her gifts and her contributions a blessing for the future.


Sept. 17, 2010 Update: Monetary donations to Middletown’s Amazing Grace Food Pantry can be made in Nora’s memory by visiting the following site.

 

[tags]Nora Miller, Office of Behavioral Health, Amazing Grace Food Pantry[/tags]

Fall Breezes, Turning to the Future

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There is a cool breeze today and the weatherman tells me it’s a harbinger of fall.  I can see the excitement of students checking out new classes, and faculty are being re-energized by the thoughtful questions posed in seminars or in sessions with advisees. This week also marks the beginning of the fall sports schedule, and we start off by hosting Williams in men’s and women’s soccer and field hockey on Saturday. Come out and cheer the Cardinals!

But the air is also filled with mixed messages. On the faculty list-serve this week Wesleyan’s Muslim Chaplain, Marwa Aly, sent a thoughtful, heartfelt message deploring the hate speech being directed at Muslims in many parts of the country. She asks for something as basic as it is important: that we act with care and understanding toward members of our community, and that we stand up to hate when it is expressed around us. At Rosh Hashanah services yesterday Wesleyan’s Jewish Chaplain, David Teva, reminded us of some of the many intersections of Jewish and Islamic rituals. He spoke of the importance of taking care of one another, and of taking a stance against injustice. As we turned ourselves toward the gates of the new year, we also remembered the work for peace and understanding that must continue as we enter 5771.

The ideals of peace and understanding aren’t just large abstractions to which we pay lip service. They can be part of our everyday lives, part of our community. Want an example? Check out the celebration of Wesleyan’s Green Street Art Center’s new North End Mural this evening at 5:30.  For new students, this will be an opportunity to get to know the great programs at GSAC. For old timers, it will be an occasion to celebrate the arts and education (and delicious food!) with friends and neighbors.

Cool fall breezes, to be sure, and they carry lots of hope for a great year.

[tags]soccer, field hockey, Marwa Aly, David Teva, Green Street Arts Center, North End Mural[/tags]

Labor Day and the Start of the Semester

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This year our first day of the semester is also Labor Day, which has certainly caused grumbling among some of us who have to show up for class on Monday rather than enjoying the last long weekend of summer. And of course it’s not just a matter of showing up Monday. Syllabi need final preparation, lectures must be written, and advisees are looking for guidance.

But on this Labor Day we should remember those who won’t have to report this week at all because there aren’t enough jobs. With official unemployment stubbornly remaining between 9% and 10%, there are many around us who are suffering from the poverty and despair of not being able to find work. Bob Herbert’s column in the New York Times on September 4 underscores the plight of a group of custodians recently laid off from their jobs at a luxury office building in Los Angeles. Closer to home, the Middletown food bank Amazing Grace reports a red alert because of the low level of supplies on their shelves. Right here at Wesleyan, we have made a small number of position reductions over the last 18 months. Each job is personal not just institutional, and each position elimination was painful.

As students plan their courses for the fall, and as faculty plan their curricula, how should we connect the reality of labor and unemployment to the broad liberal learning we so value? It can be done very specifically, as with Claire Potter’s Frosh History Seminar on Poverty in the United States, and it can be done more generally by thinking through how a liberal arts education is related to how one will support oneself. As I have said many times now in various venues, I believe a liberal education has never been more relevant to work in the world than it is today. This has little to do with the specific choice of concentration by an undergraduate. I was recently talking to a Wes parent who told me that in interviewing over a thousand people for jobs over the years he has never asked what somebody majored in during college. Instead, he has been looking for the ability to think creatively and critically, to imagine possibilities and to solve problems. This is the kind of ability cultivated by liberal learning.

A liberal education teaches that rigor and innovation, far from being in tension with one another, can often go hand in hand. Patience and diligence — practice and method — are qualities developed across a liberal arts curriculum. The American pragmatists celebrated inquiry as a mode of experience, and teachers and students today continue to believe that we must reflexively look back on our own inquiries to assess the learning process and whether the results are relevant to life beyond the specific questions being pursued. Self-criticism need not be navel-gazing. The practical is not the enemy of the true.

For years I have been saying that an undergraduate education should help students to discover what they love to do, and to get better at it. I’ve recently realized that it is important to emphasize a third goal: to develop the capacity to share what one loves to do (and has gotten a little better at) with others. This third goal, let’s call it “engagement,” connects what one has learned with what one can do with the communities to which one belongs.

The education that our students begin on Labor Day doesn’t promise a specific kind of job, but it does promise to expand one’s possibilities for meaningful work after graduation. Learning to learn also means learning to work, to engage with others in getting things done, creating opportunities and solving problems. Engaging with others also means being aware when we can be helpful to those in need, those who may not have the same opportunities we are enjoying while at the university.

My hope for Labor Day and the beginning of the semester is that through study and engagement we will eventually learn to create more jobs so that the perils and anxieties that mark this year’s holiday won’t become permanent parts of our economy and culture.

[tags]unemployment, Labor Day, Bob Herbert, New York Times, Amazing Grace Food Pantry, Claire Potter, Poverty in the United States, liberal arts education[/tags]

Making Wesleyan Their Own

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This morning Kari and I will greet first-year students and help them move into residence halls around the campus. The class of 2014 was culled from over 10,600 applications (a 29% increase over just two years ago), and it promises to be a talented, caring, creative and hard-working group. We’ve already been meeting some of the international students who are part of the frosh class. Most Internationals arrived Sunday, and at our dinner the following night we talked with folks from India, Turkey, Japan, China, France and Thailand (to name only a few of the countries from which our new students hail).

Fall athletes are also back, and from the look of some of the folks I’ve been running into on campus, many spent at least some of the summer getting in shape for an intense season. I’ve met with the families of the football team, along with the new coaching staff, and they seemed poised for an exciting fall. Over the summer I learned that volleyball and swimming garnered national team academic honors. I take great pride in the scholarly accomplishments of so many of our athletes.

Faculty are also back on campus, and they will soon be meeting with advisees to talk about schedules, choices of major and generally how to get the most out of one’s time at Wes. Professors have been working during the summer on research, much of which will inform their thinking as they begin the semester. The virtuous circle of intellectual work that connects teaching and scholarship will be in evidence throughout the term, as the classroom becomes a place of inspiration for student and teacher alike.

Today I will be greeting many parents who will be filled with mixed emotions as they drop off their students. I look forward to checking in with them again with shared pride as their sons and daughters make Wesleyan their own.

[tags]class of 2014, international students, athletes, volleyball, swimming[/tags]

Looking to the Year Ahead

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It’s late August, and students around the country are packing suitcases, organizing books and music, and figuring out how to say goodbye to friends and family as they get set to head off to their respective college campuses. Here at Wesleyan some of our student residential life staff members are already back and attending training sessions to put in place plans for the year ahead. Soon the international students will arrive, followed by fall athletes and then the Class of 2014. The campus comes back to life in stages, it seems, and with each new group I get those back-to-school butterflies and sense of excitement. I also realize that I’d better finish tinkering with my syllabus and get those lectures together for The Modern and the Postmodern!

I recently met with the Cabinet to discuss our goals for the coming year, and I was so impressed by the energy and ambition of the group. We heard two presentations, the first from Sonia Manjon, whose new title is Vice President for Institutional Partnerships and Chief Diversity Officer. Sonia described a program called Making Excellence Inclusive that has been developed by the American Association of Colleges and Universities. We discussed how important it is to go beyond rhetoric to build sustainable programs that treat the  diversity  of our communities as an educational asset. Difference, she stressed, is not a problem to be fixed but a resource on which we can draw. I look forward to working with Sonia, faculty, students, staff and alumni to continue building a vibrant, dynamic learning community from our multiplicity of perspectives and experiences.

Interim Provost Rob Rosenthal made a presentation on the “engaged university” in which he described the multiple layers of positive interactions we can create on campus and the relationships we can build between our university and the other communities in which we participate. As a faculty member, Rob has been a pioneer in campus-community partnerships, and along with several colleagues has worked tirelessly to embed civic engagement within the curriculum. We were all energized by thinking of ways we can develop our engaged university, whether that be through “action teaching,” new courses, partnerships, or other programs.

It’s late August, and we’re getting ready for a great year!

[tags]The Modern and the Postmodern, Sonia Manjon, Vice President for Institutional Partnerships and Chief Diversity Officer, Making Excellence Inclusive, American Association of Colleges and Universities, Rob Rosenthal[/tags]