Tomorrow, Saturday, September 21, we welcome Middletown residents onto campus for an afternoon of games, music and athletic contests. We will dedicate the new Turf Field and Andersen Track at noon, and you can catch plenty of great games from men’s and women’s soccer and field hockey. The football season gets underway at 6:00 pm — our first night game ever!
It should be a great day. GO WES!!
Yesterday I sent messages to faculty, staff and students asking for new ideas to enhance the distinctive educational experience of Wesleyan students by making the most of our residential dimension. Our new Provost, Ruth Striegel Weissman, will be working with other Cabinet members to vet the short proposals we will receive. When I asked for input for big projects six years ago, we received ideas that enabled us to create new writing programs (eventually the Shapiro Writing Center), research stipends, and the College of the Environment. I can hardly wait to see what new ideas come forward this time!
Here’s the faculty version of my email:
Dear Colleagues,
At last week’s faculty meeting I announced that we are inviting faculty members to submit 1-2 page proposals for initiatives that have the potential to significantly improve the distinctive educational experience of Wesleyan students by leveraging its residential dimensions. What kinds of programs should we strengthen or create to offer our students deeper opportunities for learning? What kinds of programs should we create or strengthen to extend the impact of the years spent on the Wesleyan campus?
Someone pointed out to me that I barely mentioned MOOCs in my remarks to the faculty. That’s because although our experiments in online education continue in modest ways, these are in no way substitutes for innovation on campus. Rather, they put into sharper relief what is so very valuable about residential education. I realize that our curriculum evolves organically, and that many departments are regularly renewing the offerings. But Ruth and I agree that this is a particularly propitious time to launch experiments aimed at enhancing our work as a residential liberal arts university. From advising to the First Year Seminars, from interdisciplinary programs to capstones, our work here should build on our residential foundations. How can we do so more effectively?
We need your ideas. We hope to receive 1-2 page proposals from faculty members by November 1. Proposals may be submitted to 2020@wesleyan.edu. We will also be soliciting ideas from students and staff. The Provost’s Office will convene a group to evaluate faculty proposals and choose a short list of contenders. At that point we will request more detailed proposals.
Thank you in advance for thinking about how we might even further energize the distinctive educational experience of Wesleyan students.
From time to time my work takes me back to psychology, or at least to psychoanalysis. Last week I spoke at Clark University on Sigmund Freud. This was particularly meaningful to me because I often teach Freud’s “Clark Lectures,” and Clark was the only university at which Freud spoke. I even got my picture taken with the Freud statue!
I published a review on more mainstream psychological research in today’s Washington Post. The book deals with memory and amnesia, a topic on which I’ve worked over the years. I’ve attached it below.
PERMANENT PRESENT TENSE The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H. M. By Suzanne Corkin Basic. 364 pp. $28.99
Henry Molaison (1926-2008) lived a long life, but as it turned out, he experienced most of it in a very short time segments. His seizures started early, and by the time he was in high school they had become frequent. Medications to control epilepsy had a variety of side effects, and still they didn’t eliminate the seizures. The terrible blackouts were always a possibility.
Wilder Penfield had been experimenting with brain surgery on human patients since the 1920s, sometimes “operating on epilepsy patients while they were awake and conscious so that he could pinpoint the abnormal tissue responsible for their seizures.” Penfield’s work received widespread recognition, and when William Scoville examined Henry in the early 1950s, a surgical option seemed likely to provide some relief to the patient. We can imagine why Henry, then 27, and his parents decided to take a chance. Everyone involved knew that the operation was experimental, even risky. The lobotomy was scheduled.
Scoville extracted the front half of Henry’s hippocampus and most of the amygdala, among other parts of his brain. He hoped that this would significantly reduce the frequency of seizures. It didn’t work. Nobody seemed to consider the possibility that the patient would lose the ability to create any new, lasting memories. But that’s what happened. For the next 54 years Henry lived in “a world bounded by thirty seconds.”
Henry’s world was fascinating — for neuroscientists and psychologists — because it was a window onto how memory functions. He became one of the most studied human beings on the planet. Suzanne Corkin met him when she was a graduate student because her teacher co-authored a paper on Henry with surgeon Scoville. “Henry’s case,” as she puts it in one of her many inelegant phrases, “fell into my lap.”
The case defined Corkin’s career and became absolutely crucial for the development of the sciences of memory. Neuroscientists came to understand the “extent to which memory depended on a few centimeters of tissue in the medial temporal lobe” because a surgeon had destroyed those pieces of Henry’s brain.
Henry could not care for himself without significant help because he would forget just about everything that was going on around him. But psychologists and neurologists, Corkin first among them, made sure that Henry had a decent life. He would be brought to MIT on a regular basis for batteries of tests. Some odd things here and there seemed to stick in his mind; there was a sense of familiarity about a few people and a few tasks. Most of the time, he was happy enough to be a test subject — not remembering that he had been tested before, time and again, for decades.
Corkin expertly uses Henry’s case to illuminate major trends in memory research. Perhaps the fundamental lesson that scientists have drawn from his case — besides eventually stopping experimental lobotomies — is that memory is a complex interweaving of cognitive systems. Short-term memory (recalling something for up to 15 seconds) could be intact without any bearing on long-term memory. Henry could hold on to number patterns, for example, for about 15 seconds, but if more storage was needed in a task, he was deficient. He was able to call on “working memory” (the ability to store small amounts of experience while focused) in specific tasks, but he was not able to register the experiences for the long term required to concentrate on those tasks. Henry could respond correctly when he could focus, but he would lose the experience forever once the task was complete. Overall, Corkin tells us in her matter-of-fact way, “in spite of his tragedy, Henry got along.”
The explicit retrieval of the past is declarative memory: We are purposively calling up something that we experienced. Through remembering, the brain changes itself as new associations are formed with what is retrieved. Each time long-term memories are retrieved, they are edited — showing “that memory is an ongoing dynamic process driven by life’s events.” Henry’s case revealed how necessary the hippocampus is for this process.
In reading about Henry as a test subject and “guide” for neuroscience, I was eager to learn more about other aspects of his life over these decades. Corkin seems to have grown genuinely attached to her mild-mannered scientific treasure trove, but her descriptions of his existence are flat, at best. We get only the faintest glimpse of how it felt to live this rudely segmented life. The destruction of his amygdala probably flattened his emotions, his desires. Corkin tells us that after the death of his father, Henry did not “consciously grasp that his father was gone unless someone reminded him.” Yet over four years the loss seemed to sink in. It was Henry’s own words that I found especially moving: “I am having a debate with myself — about my dad. . . . I’m not easy in my mind. On the one side, I think he has been called — he’s gone — but on the other, I think he’s alive. I can’t figure it out.”
For years Henry lived with his mother, and there are indications that their relationship was complex and difficult. But this was not the subject of the neuroscientist’s research. This book informs us that at times Henry was prone to terrible rages and that he even threatened to kill himself, but there is little attempt to see the world from his point of view. Perhaps that would have been impossible; it would certainly have been inconvenient.
Corkin acknowledges how important Henry was for her work. She recognizes that “our research with Henry was certainly a boon to my lab’s reputation” and affirms his “limitless worth as a research participant.” But what does it mean to participate without memory? Corkin became Henry’s guardian in his later years and saw to it that he was comfortable and well cared for. She also saw to it that upon his death, his brain was quickly removed from his skull so that it could be studied with all the technology now at our disposal.
“Henry was dead,” Corkin writes, “but he remained a precious research participant.” How you feel about such a sentence will probably be a good indicator of how you will feel about poor Henry and his doctors in “Permanent Present Tense.”
This week I received the following message from Evan Okun ’13.
During the semi-finals of the Collegiate National poetry slam (in NYC) last spring, Lily Myers (Wes ’15) performed a poem about her family. It was video taped, uploaded to youtube, and currently has almost 150,000 VIEWS!!!!!!! Her piece exemplifies Wesleyan’s progressive thinking, innovative writing, and emotional honesty when it comes to Slam Poetry.
Now since Evan was such an exemplar of passionate, practical idealism, I couldn’t wait to hear Lily’s poem. I think he’s absolutely right. No?
[youtube]http://youtu.be/zQucWXWXp3k[/youtube]
Yesterday I visited the wonderful Alumni Show II at the Zilkha Gallery in the Center for the Arts. Curated by John Ravenal ’81 P’15, the exhibition offers a compelling look at the wide-ranging talents of Wes grads working in a variety of media. John began with over 150 artists and eventually pared the list back to 17 alumni whose work is displayed now on campus. From John Hatleberg’s ’79 Hope Diamond replica to Stephanie Calvert’s ’08 lush paintings, the art displayed at Zilkha delights, provokes…makes you pay attention and makes you think. It’s very cool.
At the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies Tom Zetterstrom’s photographs from China are now on display. These pictures from 1981 promise to remind us of a key moment in China’s recent history. Next week the Davison Art Gallery will open an exhibition exploring seriality in American printmaking. The interplay of repetition and variation will figure prominently in the exhibition opening on September 19th.
It’s the 40th anniversary of the Center for the Arts this year, and there will be plenty of activities throughout the year. We began with the musical Mash, and plenty of groups were really shredding it on stages across the campus. (I learned this word from a first-year student at the campus BB-Q.) Here’s a pic from the Smokin Lillies set:
![eve_cos_2013-0906142003[3]](https://roth.blogs.wesleyan.edu/files/2013/09/eve_cos_2013-09061420033.jpg)
Make art, make music, make Wesleyan as creative a campus as we possibly can!
When I was a student at Wesleyan in the 1970s, I spent almost every Monday night at Russell House attending lectures from the Center for the Humanities. They usually drew a decent sized audience of faculty and students, and many of the visiting speakers were big names in their fields. It was the heyday of critical theory and deconstruction, and I heard many a talk in these areas that I found difficult to understand. Still, I was always at what were affectionately called “Monday Night Services.” Knowledge was happening at the Center, and I wanted to be part of it.
Years later I came back to Wesleyan to offer a Monday night lecture at Russell House. My faculty advisor, Henry Abelove, was the director of the Center at that point, and he’d asked me to talk about psychoanalysis and the exhibition I’d curated about Sigmund Freud at the Library of Congress. I found it terrifically moving to stand at the podium there where I had often sat in the audience (bewildered).
The Center for the Humanities has gone through a variety of incarnations since it was founded in 1959. Its current director, Ethan Kleinberg, has beefed up its web presence (see iTunes and YouTube), brought together a great group of fellows and speakers, and planned some exciting events. Next Monday at 6 p.m., Professor Samuel Moyn, from Columbia University, will speak on “The Political Origins of Global Justice.” This lecture kicks off the series on Justice and Judgment. The lecture series has moved from Russell House and will take place in the Daniel Family Commons (on the third floor of Usdan).
From September 26-28, The Center will host a conference on Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which was published 50 years ago. Arendt, one of the most important political theorists of the 20th century, came to Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities to finish the book, and so it’s particularly fitting that the conference marking its publication will take place here.
For its first 50 years the Center for the Humanities operated with various funding streams that fluctuated with the times. We decided to change that and asked the Mellon Foundation for help. I am delighted to let everyone know that in the late spring we completed a matching gift program with Mellon. Wesleyan raised $4 million in endowment funds, and the foundation added another $2 million! Others may be fretting about the “crisis in the humanities,” but thanks to the generosity of our donors the Center for the Humanities will continue to offer great things to Wesleyan and the world for decades to come.
While I sat in schul this morning to mark Rosh Hashana, my office sent out an all-campus email with some updates for the beginning of the school year. I’ve pasted it in below. Tomorrow afternoon we continue building a new tradition at Wesleyan — a music festival (The Mash — video from last year) on the first Friday of the academic year. There will be plenty of student bands playing around campus, and I’ll be joining Dean Louise Brown, Prof. Barry Chernoff and a couple of their bandmates from the Smokin Lillies to kick it off. We’ll be rockin out on the Church Street side of Olin Library.
Dear friends,
The new year is underway, the humidity has lifted… books are being read, experiments are being conducted, music and sports are being played, films and paintings are being viewed, poems and stories are being written… Welcome to 2013-2014! Here are a few updates.
Financial Aid and the ‘THIS IS WHY’ Campaign. We are working hard to deploy our financial aid resources as effectively as possible – keeping loans to a minimum while meeting the full need of students. At the same time we’ve made financial aid the centerpiece of our fundraising efforts. And this past year I’m so pleased to announce we raised more money than ever before! As of August 21st, the Campaign is at $306,130,869 in gifts and pledges, well on our way toward our fundraising goal of $400 million. Most of the money is going to the endowment. Financial aid – now more than ever!
Posse Partnership. Wesleyan values a diverse campus culture and actively recruits talented needy students through partnerships with community groups and foundations. I’m pleased to announce a new partnership, this one with the Posse Foundation. Beginning next fall we will annually bring a cohort of ten military veterans to our campus.
Searches. Two administrative positions central to the university, the Chief Diversity Officer and the Director of Public Safety, remain open, but the searches have made great progress and interviews are taking place over the next weeks. The first of these is a Cabinet position (being ably held on an interim basis by Dean Marina Melendez), and the second now reports directly to Mike Whaley, Vice President for Student Affairs. The external review of Public Safety begun last spring is expected shortly, and we plan to share a summary with the community as we begin to vet and implement the recommended changes.
Campus Climate Report. Last spring, two campus climate surveys were conducted: one for students and one for faculty, staff and graduate students. The results of the first will not be ready for some weeks, and unfortunately there is some question as to how useful they will be due to low participation. Participation in the second survey was greater, and those results are presented HERE.
The findings of this survey indicate that the area in which we need to improve is the effects of hierarchy on inclusion. Those of lower position within our hierarchies tended to have a less favorable view of the campus climate. This should alert us to ensuring that we treat everyone on campus with respect, regardless of their position and our own.
MASH. This Friday it’s the MASH, a festival that highlights the student music scene on campus, showcasing some of Wesleyan’s most popular student bands and musical groups. I’ll be joining (on keyboards) with the Smokin Lillies to kick things off in front of Olin Library at 2:00 PM. There will be different stages for performances, culminating in bands serenading an all-campus BBQ at the base of Foss Hill Friday evening.
Night Game and Middletown Day. We are inviting our neighbors to campus for a day of athletic contests and fun on September 21. We’ll finish things up with the first night football game in NESCAC history. It’s against Tufts. Go Wes!
Welcome to 2013-2014! May the new year be filled with sweetness, exuberance and joy!
Over the summer I finished a short book called Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters. It will be published in the spring. I also reviewed two interesting books on American higher education, one that focused on teaching and the other providing a broad overview of the sector. You can find my review of Why Teach? here, and of Higher Education in America, from yesterday’s Washington Post, below.
Today classes begin, and I am delighted to head back to the classroom. Last night we heard some of the amazingly talented students who sing a capella at Wes, and now we are finishing our syllabi and checking our reserve readings. I am teaching the Past on Film and am looking forward to meeting the students.
American higher education is the envy of the world. Students flock to this country from all over, and the most highly ranked schools tend to be here. We should be proud!
American higher education is a mess. With high costs, low graduation rates, unhappy faculty members and coddled students, our universities are about to be radically disrupted by massive, technologically driven change. A good thing, too!
How to reconcile these opposing views? At a time when ambitious business-school professors and salivating entrepreneurs predict the end of the university as we know it, and at a time when we have never been more in need of an educated workforce and citizenry, the task of understanding the evolving mission and performance of American higher education has never been more urgent. Thank goodness Derek Bok, a two-time president of Harvard and a judicious, learned analyst of education, has taken on this undertaking. His book is too long to be called a report card, but it is a detailed progress report on the challenges and opportunities facing our nation’s colleges and universities.
One of the first things to note about higher ed in the United States is its heterogeneity. The problems of Harvard are not the same as the problems of the University of Texas or those of Scripps College in California or of LaGuardia Community College in New York. Bok tries to address schools in all their multiplicity, and his book suffers somewhat from the clunkiness that also characterizes higher ed. The book’s five sections discuss instruction from undergraduate to graduate and professional schools, as well as the market forces at work at each level. After the introduction, there are five forewords and four afterwords — not including the short final chapter called “The Last Word.” Yet one forgives redundancies because of the thoroughness of the research and the measured judgment consistently applied.
After noting the variety in higher ed, Bok acknowledges the extraordinary inequalities in the sector. Public discussion of education often focuses on the schools most difficult to get into, but “no more than two hundred colleges regularly reject more students than they admit.” At most highly selective schools (such as the one at which I am president), students receive some subsidy from the institution — even those paying full tuition. Students enrolled at less-selective schools get a small fraction of that support. Public institutions have seen dramatic reductions in state support for universities, and many flagship campuses are scrambling for donations and out-of-state, full-tuition-paying students. Community colleges enroll dramatically more people than other parts of the sector, but most of these students will never earn a degree.
Bok shows that the current quip that universities haven’t changed their teaching styles since the Middle Ages is just an empty canard. Universities have adapted surprisingly well to massive changes in technology, in demography and in developing streams of support. But Bok is no Pollyana, emphasizing that “universities have been especially slow to act . . . in improving the quality of undergraduate education.” Professors often confuse their desire to teach what interests them the most with what undergrads need to learn, and students in recent years are spending far less time on their studies than in past generations. Bok shows how schools cater to students in order to attract more of them, often with little attention to how campus amenities provide distractions from studying.
Bok knows the governance structures of universities as well as anyone, and he realizes that true curricular reform has to be led by the faculty. The challenge, from his perspective, is to make the faculty (at least its leadership) more aware of the empirical work on student learning that has been done over the past decade. Professors may be focused on their research and distracted by committee work, but the evidence shows that they care deeply about teaching effectiveness.
“The key to educational reform,” Bok writes, “lies in gathering evidence that will convince faculty that current teaching methods are not accomplishing the results that the professors assume are taking place.” Once the teachers understand the need for change, they will rise to the occasion and create classes that are more effective at developing the capacities that most agree are essential in college graduates. They have done so in the past, and they will do so again.
Bok’s confidence in the faculty is characteristic of his approach in this book. He believes that our varied system of higher education is very much capable of self-correction. Do we need to bend the cost curve? Sure, and that is why experiments such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) are so interesting (and mostly led by university veterans). Is there a liberal bias on our campuses? Sure, and it has been there at least since the 1940s, but faculty members realize they need more political diversity. Do university leaders spend too much time raising money? Sure, but American schools — especially the selective ones — get much more support than schools in other countries. We may have the worst system, he jokes, but like democracy, it’s better than all the alternatives.
Bok underscores two areas in urgent need of improvement: increasing the percentage of students who graduate from college and improving the quality of undergraduate education. We must do a better job attracting low-income students to our best colleges and universities, no longer wasting financial aid on wealthy students with high SAT scores to improve an institution’s place in bogus rankings. We must also do a better job of stimulating curricular reform and assessment so as to be sure students are working hard to learn what they need to know — whether at a community college or a research university. Of course, reaching agreement on what students need to know is a great challenge, but that’s the core of the faculty’s responsibility.
Competition among schools produces benefits and causes problems. Most of the important ones are addressed in Bok’s helpful volume. I hope he is right that we already have the ingredients in place to make the necessary reforms. I know we need university leaders like him to help activate those ingredients so that American higher education can continue to contribute in vital ways to our culture, our economy and our polity.
Over the last few years I have met several times with students, faculty and staff concerning “differently abled” students. On one level, the university’s policies in this regard are clear:
Wesleyan University is committed to supporting all students in their academic and co-curricular endeavors. Each semester, a number of students document learning, physical, sensory, or psychiatric disabilities which may require reasonable accommodations to ensure access to education, housing, and recreation.
Access is a key word, and we want to make sure that all students — whether they are dealing with broken ankles, depression, or hearing loss — can thrive on our campus. This can be a challenge for all concerned, but all concerned can learn from the challenge; we can learn to try to experience the world from the perspective of people whose abilities may be different from our own.
In our classrooms students with documented disabilities are encouraged to make arrangements for appropriate accommodations. Laura Patey, Associate Dean for Student Academic Resources, can help in this process. This is from her office’s webpage:
Students who request accommodations are required to provide documentation outlining their needs. In addition, students will need to meet with Dean Patey to discuss how appropriate accommodations or modifications may assist them in participating in campus life or courses and fulfilling course requirements. In addition, Dean Patey will discuss other types of support and services available to all Wesleyan students, such as tutoring programs and writing support through the Writing Workshop.
Like most professors, over the years I’ve worked with many students whose physical and psychiatric disabilities have profoundly influenced the way they think and feel. I have learned much from them about the conventions we used to divide groups into the normal and the abnormal, and I have often admired the capacities these students develop to navigate in a world that privileges particular modes of living and particular cultures. In recent years, the field of Disability Studies has been developing to examine these divisions, privileges and cultures. At Wesleyan, the field is described, in part, as follows: Disability Studies at Wesleyan does not ascribe or attribute disability to specific bodies, psychological conditions, or groups, but rather teaches students to understand the classificatory conventions that decide what is normal/able or abnormal/disabled in a given time and place. The webpage for this course cluster lists many resources in the field.
In my first year of teaching I worked extensively with a student whose mental illness came, frighteningly, in almost predictable waves. She explained this to me forthrightly, and we studied together very closely in a tutorial on Nietzsche while she was able to do so. Her courage and clear-sightedness were inspiring, although they were not enough to prevent her illness from recurring. I’ve written about this experience in “On A Certain Blindness in Teaching,” and I often think about the many students I’ve had over the years who have faced their problems with extraordinary tenacity, sensitivity and openness. They are hungry to learn, and they teach their teachers so much.
When we invoke with pride the moniker “Diversity University,” we should remember that this also refers to people with a varied abilities/disabilities. In regard to economic inequality I wrote that it was not enough to recruit students from low-income groups and provide financial aid that meets their full need without excessive loans. A similar principle should guide our efforts at inclusion in regard to people with different abilities/disabilities. It is important but not sufficient to provide access, including the relevant accommodations. We must create a campus culture in which all can thrive; we must create the conditions for an educational experience in which students from all backgrounds learn together and learn from one another.
That’s a goal worth striving for, with all the abilities we have.
Looking from my office window, I see that cars are already pulling up to Andrus field. It’s going to be a great day to meet our new students and to help them move in.
![photo[6]](https://roth.blogs.wesleyan.edu/files/2013/08/photo6.jpg)
Throughout the day, photographer Olivia Drake will be posting pics. WELCOME 2017!
Olivia has posted more photos HERE.
My remarks to the families of our new students can be viewed HERE or below.
[youtube]http://youtu.be/xyGSv12hsc8[/youtube]
