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Review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction

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This review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History  appeared in the Washington Post this morning. I know there are many people at Wesleyan searching for ways to make a difference in the face of the environmental disasters of climate change. Kolbert is a thoughtful, engaged and determined guide.

 

Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Field Notes From a Catastrophe” (2006) presented a powerful account of how climate change was disrupting lives around the planet. Whether the New Yorker columnist was visiting a utility company in Burlington, Vt., ice sheets in Greenland or floating cities in the Netherlands, she deftly blended science and personal experience to warn of the enormous harm created by human-generated climate change. The last chapter of that book, “Man in the Anthropocene,” underscored that we had entered an era in which human beings had begun to change everything about the planet’s interlocking ecosystems, and that we had put much of those systems and our own species at enormous risk.“It may seem impossible,” Kolbert concluded, “to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”

(Henry Holt) – ‘The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History’ by Elizabeth Kolbert

In her new book, “The Sixth Extinction,” she provides a tour de horizon of the Anthropocene Age’s destructive maw, and it is a fascinating and frightening excursion. We humans have been bad news for most of the world’s living things, causing massive extinctions of species with which we share the planet. Unless we change our ways, she argues convincingly, we will certainly cause our own demise.

Until the 18th century, scientists didn’t have a clear idea that species could become extinct. Kolbert credits the French naturalist Georges Cuvier, writing in the wake of the great Revolution, with realizing that whole branches of the tree of life could permanently be cut off. Still, most of those who studied natural history were sure that extinctions happened only gradually over very long periods of time. This uniformitarian view would fit well with Darwin’s perspective on the slow and steady pace of evolutionary change through natural selection. Species did become extinct, but only very slowly as other competitors adapted more successfully to the environment around them.

This view of extinctions was definitively shattered by the work of Luis and Walter Alvarez, a father-son team who demonstrated that the Cretaceous period ended when an asteroid struck the Earth and radically changed the planet’s climate. In what has come to be called the K-T extinction, “every animal larger than a cat seems to have died out,” and things were no better in the water. The dinosaurs were just the most celebrated victims: “Following the K-T extinction,” Kolbert emphasizes, “it took millions of years for life to recover its former level of diversity.”

The scientific consensus was that things evolved very slowly, except in the face of radical events — like an asteroid crashing into the Earth. Today there is another asteroid hitting the planet, and it’s us. Slow “adaptation” in the Darwinian sense is meaningless if a creature very suddenly has to face conditions that “it has never before encountered in its entire evolutionary history.” In our age, the Anthropocene, these are the conditions human beings have been creating (very quickly) for other forms of life.

As in “Field Notes From a Catastrophe,” Kolbert presents powerful cases to bring her point home. Oceans are highly stressed by climate change, for example, and acidification of the seas is driving the extraordinary ecosystems of coral reefs into extinction. Plants and animals are desperate to migrate to more hospitable climes, while others can’t survive the arrival of the newcomers. According to entomologist E.O. Wilson, whom she cites, we are now reducing biological diversity to its lowest level since the Cretaceous period.

Some of these changes have been created by our species breaking down barriers among other species as life forms tag along on our boats and planes from one part of the globe to another. Snakes in Guam, snails in Hawaii and thousands of other species brought by human beings into new environments, intentionally or not, have “succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.” As we make the world more interconnected than ever (“The New Pangaea”), the fatal vulnerabilities in thousands of species are exposed. The recent annihilation of bat populations in the Northeast, for example, has been caused by a foreign fungus that the animals had never encountered and so had no defense against. When a new fungus appears, Kolbert writes, “it’s like bringing a gun to a knife fight.”

The alterations initiated by human beings build on one another, accelerating change in ways that make it all but impossible for most species to adapt quickly enough. As the great environmentalist Rachel Carson put it, “Time is the essential ingredient, but in the modern world there is no time.” But Kolbert is not nostalgic: “Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it’s not clear that he ever really did.”

Kolbert devotes a chapter, “The Madness Gene,” to considering the attribute of human beings that requires change in order to flourish. Unlike other species, modern humans, endowed with language, seem driven to embark on perpetual improvement projects in the course of which they alter everything around them. “With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it,” she writes. “A tiny set of genetic variations divides us from the Neanderthals, but that has made all the difference.”

Carson, a worthy model for Kolbert, wrote of “the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures.” We are deciding, Kolbert concludes, “which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed.” Our history determines the course of life on the planet. Our species changes the world, and now the most urgent question is whether we can take responsibility for what we do. “The Sixth Extinction” is a bold and at times desperate attempt to awaken us to this responsibility.

Think Summer….Think Summer

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photo[16]photo[12]

 

 

Looking out my window at snowy Andrus field, or walking Mathilde gingerly on the sidewalks around campus, it sometimes seems like we are in for an endless winter. The dominant subject for discussion on the faculty listserve is snow removal, and finding a couple of tons of salt this week was a cause for celebration in North College. Winter in New England. Nobody said it was going to be easy.

But yesterday was at times glorious, with the sunshine beginning to melt the ice and warm the heart. I didn’t need gloves or a hat when I went for my lunch at Usdan, and everyone seemed just a little cheerier. I know it’s just a tease, but still it’s fun to begin thinking of spring and SUMMER!

Yes, summer will be here before we know it, and that means (of course) we can start thinking about the Wesleyan Summer Session! Every year now there are hundreds of students on campus from June through August pursuing research, holding down jobs and taking classes. Continuing Education puts it this way:

Wesleyan University offers an intensive Summer Session in which students can complete semester-long courses in only five weeks; courses are offered in both June and July. Wesleyan Summer Session is open to students who feel they have the academic qualifications and stamina to complete an intellectually challenging course in a compressed schedule. Residential options are available for both Wesleyan undergraduates and non-Wesleyan students.

And I remind you that the classes, in poetry or biology, archaeology or government, CAN BE HELD OUTSIDE! It’s a lovely way to study and earn credit. A course listing can be found here.

People take summer classes for all sorts of reasons, but one of them may be a decision to graduate early. Wesleyan offers students the opportunity to graduate ahead of the traditional four-year schedule, which can save families quite a lot of money (and allow students to go on to other things). You can learn more about the three-year program here.

 

Professors Serving Scholarship and Social Good

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Sunday’s Nicholas Kristof’s column (NYT online) was entitled “Professors, We need You!”  He begins this way, “Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates,” and then he quotes former Princeton prof Anne-Marie Slaughter: “All the disciplines have become more and more specialized and more and more quantitative, making them less and less accessible to the general public.”

I think there is a lot of truth to this line of thought, and it is worth emphasizing that most graduate programs do promote specialization at the expense of broader communication. Acquiring deep expertise in molecular biology, macroeconomics or romantic poetry is a vital endeavor, but that doesn’t have to mean that the experts lose connection with the broader public. Here at Wes, I can think of so many people on the faculty who defy the trend that Kristof is describing. I hesitate to name some individuals for fear of omitting others. But here goes.

Let’s begin with the programs developed here over the years that draw on deep expertise but accentuate cross-fertilization and translation skills. The College of Social Studies and the College of Letters have depended on faculty stretching beyond their given fields for more than 50 years. The teachers don’t do this as a tired obligation but engage in these programs with real passion. The same can be said of the College of the Environment, which explicitly connects to policy and public culture through its Think Tank. The new College of Film and the Moving Image combines deep expertise about cinema with public outreach in Middletown and popular historical scholarship in the widely celebrated work of Jeanine Basinger. Newer interdisciplinary investigation is also thriving at Wesleyan. I’m thinking of our folks working in Animal Studies or in Food Studies through, say, the Long Lane Farm. There are specialists in all these programs, but they are eager to go beyond their areas of specialization and have an effect on the world.

And I can’t help but think of Richard Grossman, an economics prof who has been churning out op-eds on monetary and banking policy with great regularity, even as he publishes important scholarly economic history books. Or I think of Gina Ulysse (who teaches anthropology, FGSS and African-American Studies), who has published ethnography and also engaged in dance, spoken-word and performance pieces. I just read some of her art criticism on the Huffington Post, and I know she is also preparing her own installation/performance. That’s not what she was told to do in graduate school.

Mary-Alice Haddad in government has combined her research on civic mobilization with teaching students how to participate in political movements in our own region. Her real expertise doesn’t put her in a cloister, to use Kristof’s word; it helps her engage vital social and political issues. Similar things might be said about anthropologist Kēhaulani Kauanui’s work with indigenous people around the world or economist Gary Yohe’s efforts to understand questions of probability and risk in regard to climate change. Both have worked with the United Nations, and both reach wide audiences with serious scholarship.

Our scientists, of course, are taking on big questions in specific research through which they can make a measurable difference. This may be in regard to epilepsy (Laura Grabel, Janice Naegele, Gloster Aaron), or muscular development and degeneration (Stephen Devoto). As a group, the science faculty has undertaken an initiative to help students from under-represented groups prepare for graduate work. This pipeline program can have a powerful effect on a number of fields and on our public culture.

Historians are no strangers to a public role. Magda Teter, for example, has explicitly used her deep archival research on Polish-Jewish relations to influence the way groups interact today. Lois Brown, professor of African American Studies and English, knows more about particular slave lives than anyone alive today. She is a specialist. But she can also be an impassioned contributor to educating Americans about slavery and abolitionism through mass audience public television programs.

Speaking of “mass,” I should definitely mention Scott Plous’ enormously successful Social Psychology class on Coursera. It wasn’t just that Scott attracted more than 200,000 people to his class, it was that at every turn he connected his teaching to action in the world. On campus and on his Social Psychology Network, Scott is a leader in “action teaching.” On campus and online, he aims to ensure that the lessons of social psychology — lessons about how we live together — are not “merely academic.”

The Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life (which houses the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship, Center for Community Partnerships and Prison Education and the Quantitative Analysis Center) can stand for countless other efforts that our faculty make to connect deep academic learning to work in the world that makes a difference.

This intellectual cross-training and the translational research that is a part of it have been hallmarks of the Wesleyan experience for decades – and reason for pride for all involved with this institution.

And for the dozens and dozens of colleagues I could have mentioned in this blog…please forgive me. But perhaps you (or your students) will send in examples through the comments…

 

Award Winning Physics Alum: Guy Geyer Marcus

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I’m very late on this, but still I wanted to give a shout out to Guy Geyer Marcus ’13, who recently won the Apker Prize, which Prof. Brian Stewart tells me “is the highest award for undergraduate research in physics.”  Wade Hsu ’10 won the prize in 2010, while working closely with Prof. Francis Starr.  Wesleyan students compete against all the big research institutions, and, to quote Prof. Stewart, “to have a second award within just a few years is a real tribute to the hard work of Guy and the support of his mentor Greg Voth — and to the learning environment Wesleyan provides.”

Here’s how Guy describes his work: “My undergraduate work… ranged from experimental fluid dynamics to topics in theoretical ion trap physics. My experimental work in fluid dynamics consisted of novel measurements of the rotational dynamics of anisotropic particles in turbulence. In particular, we introduced a new class of techniques for measuring Lagrangian statistics of rotational dynamics in turbulence. These techniques may also have exciting applications in topological fluid dynamics. On the theory side, I studied fundamental problems in quantum chaos and particle dynamics in Paul traps peripherally related to quantum computing.” Guy now has a graduate fellowship at Johns Hopkins, where he’s gone on to the easy stuff like quantum matter, topological defects and skyrmion dynamics.

marcus_guy                                                                                                                   Image courtesy of Stefan Kramel

The sciences at Wesleyan continue to produce research at the highest levels, and to involve students in that work. A belated congratulations to Guy, and to all those who helped him launch such a promising scientific career.

 

Wesleyan on Ice – Hockey Thrives

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Wesleyan’s hockey teams have been having very strong seasons. Let’s start with the women. Long a hard working and dedicated group, this year the team has had a nose for the goal and an almost uncanny ability to protect our own net. Most recently against Hamilton, Cara Jankowski ’15, Jordan Schildhaus ’15 and Jess Brennan ’17, each posted a goal and an assist to lead the Cardinals to our largest margin of victory ever over visiting Hamilton, 5-0. We swept that series, and remember that Hamilton students are all used to going to class across an icy campus!

A great reason for our success is goalie Laura Corcoran ’16. Against Hamilton in the first game of the series, she came up with 27 saves to post her third shutout of the year. Laura is one of the NESCAC leaders for both save percentage and goals-against average this season, now with .944 and 1.56 figures, respectively. She anchors a fine defense, while the offense has been putting the puck in the opponents’ nets. Coach Jodi McKenna leads a great squad.

The men’s hockey team has also excelled this year, and they had an AMAZING weekend. First, they soundly beat a solid Williams’ team, 7-3, after having jumped out to a 4-0 lead. A sophomore line was firing on all cylinders, as Alex Carlacci ’16, Jaren Taenaka ’16 and Terence Durkin ’16  accounted for the final four goals of the contest for the Cardinals. Another sophomore, Jay Matthews, ’16, has had an impressive season, already earning NESCAC Player-of-the-Week honors. Our frosh phenom Elliot Vorel ’17 also received that honor and he has been an intense offensive threat all year.

Speaking of intense frosh phenoms, the Wesleyan goalie Dawson Sprigings ’17 had a superb weekend, limiting the powerful Middlebury team yesterday to just a single goal, while our guys netted a pair. Coach Chris Potter has forged a fiery, young team, and we should wish them all luck as they head up to Maine at the end of the week.

Go winter Wes!

A High Tolerance for Ambiguity…and Uncertainty

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“A high tolerance for ambiguity” is a phrase I heard often from Wesleyan trustee Joshua Boger ‘73 during my first years here as president.  I understood the phrase to mean that much creative and constructive work gets done before clarity arrives, and people who seek clarity too quickly might actually wind up missing a good deal that really matters.  Such tolerance, I imagined, had been essential to Joshua’s success as a scientist and entrepreneur.

I was reminded of this toleration for ambiguity when I read Simon Critchley’s powerful The Stone blog this week on the New York Times site. There he writes about an old television series he watched as a kid, The Ascent of Man. In that show Dr. Jacob Bronowski led viewers on a tour of major moments in cultural evolution, from primitive times to the rise and fall of empires and the achievements of modern science. It was in many respects a triumphalist show, celebrating our ever-increasing knowledge.

Critchley, though, underscores another dimension of The Ascent of Man. In explicating Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, he writes:

Dr. Bronowski insisted that the principle of uncertainty was a misnomer because it gives the impression that in science (and outside of it) we are always uncertain. But this is wrong. Knowledge is precise, but that precision is confined within a certain toleration of uncertainty.

The point is that acknowledging uncertainty should be akin to acknowledging tolerance. Knowing our tendency to err should do more than make us epistemologically prudent; it should make us more open to others and less prone to impose our own views. This resistance to narrow-mindedness and dogmatism is an ethical dimension of the pursuit of knowledge.

Critchley underscores that Dr. Bronowski’s principle of tolerance is a crucial aspect of the scientific perspective. The effort to escape uncertainty can lead to a different perspective altogether – a tyrannical one.  Here’s a very moving clip on the blog from The Ascent of Man:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Umbn6ZBuE[/youtube]

 

This week I have been teaching Hegel and Rousseau, each of whom thought he had worked out essential truths. Rousseau argued that our pursuit of knowledge was usually just a pursuit of superiority and luxury, an expression of our warped vanity more than our scientific curiosity. Hegel took a very different tack, wanting to replace the love of wisdom with absolute knowing. This knowledge was of philosophy/history – Spirit, uniting ideal and real. The ambition was to overcome uncertainty in knowledge that would also offer redemption.

Reading Critchley, I recognized that I often present thinkers who can be considered dogmatic, especially when they are at their most critical about rival philosophers. I enjoy making a case for all of the writers I teach because their powerful arguments can shake up our own conventional ways of approaching issues. I’m not trying to convert students to a new dogma, but I am trying to expand their tolerance for the range of ambiguity in which they will navigate.

Openness to learning is a lifelong endeavor, and that openness is undermined when one believes one has vanquished uncertainty. Still, in my classes I love teaching authors who do claim some truth with assurance because this sharpens one’s thinking and illuminates fundamental issues – issues that may have no resolution. Tolerance is certainly an intellectual virtue; it’s just not the only one.

Simon Critchley’s reminiscence of The Ascent of Man reminds me of Joshua’s “tolerance of ambiguity” and how uncertainty and openness might go together. That’s a good lesson to live by at a university – whether one is a student, teacher…even a president.

 

Center for the Humanities: Audiences

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This semester the Center for the Humanities explores a new theme, Audiences. Most Monday nights this term at 6 pm in the Daniel Family Commons, Wesleyan faculty and distinguished visitors will present new research. The conversations that develop after the talks help create new paths of thinking for everyone present. On Tuesday mornings, there are follow-up seminars at the CFH. Here’s a description of the theme:

The CFH theme “Audience(s)” asks us to explore the phenomena of the audience from multiple perspectives. How does audience shape the form and function of our work? Is the desire to reach a wider audience consistent with our academic or artistic goals? How should we reflect on the relation of intellectuals to their audience or audiences in general? What can the audience tell us about past or present works of scholarship, theater, music, politics or art? Does the audience shape the work and intention of the author or is the reception by the audience the moment where meaning happens? In what ways are we able to understand either the intended or actual audience for a work? What effect do existing normative practices have on the role of audience in respect to those who do not conform to them (i.e. those who do not conform to existing conventions of masculine or feminine for instance)? In addition we are eager to explore the ways in which audience behavior is changing in the new media environment and the ethical and social ramifications associated with measuring audience behavior on new media platforms. How might an understanding of multiple audiences help or complicate the issues raised above?

The series begins tonight (Feb 3) with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown, who will be talking about gender, media and privacy. You can find out more here.

This Weekend: Super Theater and Athletic Competition

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This weekend the Brooklyn-based theater collective The Assembly brings HOME/SICK to the Center for the Arts. “HOME/SICK tells the story of a handful of student activist leaders in the 1960s who, searching for justice and an end to the Vietnam War, became convinced that violence could pave the way toward peace. With ambitions to overthrow the government, they formed the Weather Underground after taking control of the Students for a Democratic Society movement in 1969.” The play combines the personal and the political, the anecdotal and the historical, and we are fortunate that this group of young alumni (and others) are staging the work at the CFA. You can read more about it here.

There is also a tide of sports events crashing into the Freeman Athletic Center this weekend. The men’s and women’s basketball teams will see plenty of action Friday night and Saturday afternoon, and the track team will be competing against a bunch of teams in another invitational. Men’s hockey is at home Saturday and Sunday…while many of our other squads are carrying the Red and Black on the road.

The semester is only just getting underway, but I suspect these artists and athletes are already at the top of their game.

 

 

 

We Can Stop Violence Against Women

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As I concluded my time in Washington D.C. this week, I was impressed to see the following statement released by the White House. First, it quotes Vice-President Biden:

Freedom from sexual assault is a basic human right.  No man has a right to raise a hand to a woman for any reason — any reason — other than self-defense.  He knows that a nation’s decency is in large part measured by how it responds to violence against women.  He knows that our daughters, our sisters, our wives, our mothers, our grandmothers have every single right to expect to be free from violence and sexual abuse.  No matter what she’s wearing, no matter whether she’s in a bar, in a dormitory, in the back seat of a car, on a street, drunk or sober, no man has a right to go beyond the word “No”.  And if she can’t consent, it also means no.  That too makes it a crime.

President Obama then went on to say:

It’s about all of us — our moms, our wives, our sisters, our daughters, our sons.  Sexual assault is an affront to our basic decency and humanity.  And for survivors, the awful pain can take years, even decades to heal.  Sometimes it lasts a lifetime.  And wherever it occurs — whether it’s in our neighborhoods or on our college campuses, our military bases or our tribal lands — it has to matter to all of us. ….

So sexual violence is more than just a crime against individuals.  It threatens our families, it threatens our communities; ultimately, it threatens the entire country.  It tears apart the fabric of our communities.  And that’s why we’re here today — because we have the power to do something about it as a government, as a nation.  We have the capacity to stop sexual assault, support those who have survived it, and bring perpetrators to justice. …

Today, we’re taking another important step with a focus on our college campuses.  It is estimated that 1 in 5 women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time there — 1 in 5.  These young women worked so hard just to get into college, often their parents are doing everything they can to help them pay for it.  So when they finally make it there only to be assaulted, that is not just a nightmare for them and their families, it’s an affront to everything they’ve worked so hard to achieve.  It’s totally unacceptable. …

My hope and intention is, is that every college president who has not personally been thinking about this is going to hear about this report and is going to go out and figure out who is in charge on their campus of responding properly, and what are the best practices, and are we doing everything that we should be doing.  And if you’re not doing that right now, I want the students at the school to ask the president what he is doing or she is doing.  And perhaps most important, we need to keep saying to anyone out there who has ever been assaulted, you are not alone.  You will never be alone.  We have your back.  I’ve got your back.

I applaud the president and vice-president for taking on this crucial issue. In a blog over the summer I wrote that “violence of any kind has no place on our campus, and sexual violence is particularly pernicious in that it plays on social stereotypes and traditions of exclusion. We applaud groups active across the country, like Know Your IX, which are calling on students to stand up for their right to study in environments free from discrimination, harassment and violence. This work is perfectly in accord with our mission to promote progressive liberal arts education for all.”

I know that we can constantly improve our practices and policies for dealing with sexual violence on campus, including violence against gay, lesbian and trans students. We do this not out of an effort to appear to have the correct politics or to avoid bad press and law suits.  We do this, as I’ve said before, because freedom from gender and sexual violence is essential to our mission as a community of learning. An inclusive learning community is one free of violence, and that’s the kind of community all of us — students, faculty and staff — work to build at Wesleyan.

The Obama administration is right to call attention to this vital issue. If anyone at Wesleyan has ideas about things we can do better in this area, please let me know. By eradicating sexual violence, together we can make our campus more inclusive and equitable.

Welcome Back!

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It’s great to see students back on campus despite the bad weather, and I’m looking forward to the start of classes – as I always do! The cold over these next days will doubtless provide an encouragement to stay indoors and get a good start on the kind of highly productive work that distinguishes faculty and students at Wesleyan.  🙂

Over the break the Wes community has surely done some celebrating, but faculty have also been preparing their classes, doing their research, and working on various educational projects. I’d like to extend a special thanks to those faculty who have been spending some time on camera to help us prepare our new Coursera class: How to Change the World.

Some students got an early start to the semester with our Winter Session and Winter on Wyllys programs. The interest shown by students augurs well for the future of these programs. And of course many of our athletes have been here competing vigorously.

Great teaching makes Wesleyan the outstanding liberal arts institution that it is, and in that regard I’m so pleased to announce that Quiara Alegría Hudes, a Pulitzer Prize recipient, will be the new Shapiro Distinguished Professor of Writing and Theater for three years beginning in the fall of 2014. Quiara served as a visiting playwright in 2012, and I have no doubt those of you who met her then will share my excitement about the return of this gifted artist. Also, noted New York Times film critic A.O. Scott will be teaching this semester in our brand-new College of Film and the Moving Image, a marvelous opportunity for the students selected for his criticism class.

Last week I joined leaders from 100 universities and 40 nonprofit groups at the White House to discuss improving access to higher education. There is no greater challenge facing higher education because research has shown that far too many highly capable students from lower-income families are not enrolling in selective universities and colleges. It’s essential that we do a better job of finding and enrolling these students if we’re going to make progress in addressing the growing economic divide in this country.

Wesleyan will do its part. We are committed to increasing the number of QuestBridge scholars on campus – low-income and first-generation students who receive full scholarships.

We will work to expand efforts to retain students from under-represented groups in STEM fields, including development of a summer bridge program and more introductory science courses revamped to support retention, as successfully demonstrated by the biology department. We’ve also partnered with the Posse Foundation to enroll 10 military veterans each year, and last week I celebrated with our first “posse” in New York. These students will join the class of 2018 in September, adding to the rich diversity of our student body.

As the new semester begins, Wesleyan renews its commitment to boldness, rigor, and practical idealism.  Welcome back!