Danielle Allen on Declaring Independence and Working for Equality

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I’ve gotten in the habit of quoting from Frederick Douglass’s magnificent July 4th Speech, but this year I want to turn to a more contemporary source of inspiration. The political theorist Danielle Allen has written powerfully about the Declaration of Independence, and I’d like just to offer some quotations from her recent conversation with Ezra Klein for my blog on this holiday weekend.

On John Adams and Benjamin Franklin as authors of the Declaration:

That’s an important thing to say out loud because Adams is someone who never owned slaves and Franklin was somebody who was an enslaver earlier in his life but repudiated enslavement and became a vocal advocate of abolition. Both Adams and Franklin were in a different place on enslavement than Jefferson was.

That matters. The Declaration of Independence fed straight into abolitionist movements and efforts. It was the basis of a text that was submitted in Massachusetts in January 1777 moving forward abolition, and abolition had been achieved already in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania by the early 1770s and 1780s.

When we focus on Jefferson, we get one part of America’s story — the story of the slaveholding South. We don’t get the part of the story which was about how abolitionism was developing already, even in the 18th century. That’s part of our story in history, too. We should see it and tell it.

On the importance of thinking of equality and freedom together:

In the 18th century, when people thought about self-government, they often described it as a product of free and equal self-governing citizens. Free and equal always went together. In order to be free, you actually had to be able to play a role in your local institutions. You had to have equal standing as a decision-maker. So freedom and equality were mutually reinforcing.

That concept of self-government predates the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution, and the remarkable transformations of the global economy achieved by industrialization and modern capitalism. As the economy transformed, as you saw the immiseration of populations in industrial centers, the question of equality came to have a different balance. There was a new question on the table: How does economic structure interact with freedom and with equality?

So with the 19th century and early 20th century, you began to have a sort of refashioning of the concept of equality primarily around economic concerns and conceptions and castes. That way, there seems to be a tension between a market economy defined as somehow rooted in a concept of freedom and equality based on equal distribution of economic resources. The Cold War brought that to a really high pitch, with the Soviet Union characterized as the political structure in favor of equality and the United States characterized as the political structure in favor of freedom.

But what that debate between those two physical systems did was obscure the fact that at their core, freedom and equality have to be linked to each other. You can’t actually have freedom for all unless most people have equal standing relationship to each other. That’s a political point in the first question. And then you fold in economic issues by asking the question: If we need to achieve equal political standing, then what kind of economic structure do we need to deliver that?

I think it is possible to have market structures that are compatible with egalitarian distributive outcomes. I think you need an egalitarian economy. You don’t need, strictly speaking, an equal distribution of material goods in order to support the kind of political equality that gives people equal standing and of shared ownership of political institutions.

On the relevance of the Declaration for the current moment:

Arbitrary use of police power was at the core of the American Revolution. Arbitrary use of police power and excessive penalty in our criminal justice system have been at the center of many people’s attention for quite a period of time now.

In the declaration, they say, all of our petitions have just been met by repeated injury. Such has been the experience for the last decade too, I think, for people who’ve been working on police reform and reimagining of our justice and public safety system. So I think there’s a lot of continuity. There’s a really strong sense of what rights should be protected and what it means not to have basic rights protected.

You can read more of the interview with Danielle Allen here. The audio of The Ezra Klein Show is available here.

HAPPY 4TH!

Higher Education Needs Antifascism Now

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Four years ago I wrote that we in higher education had a responsibility to protect freedom of inquiry and expression when it is attacked by politicians and political movements. This does not mean we should be consistently partisan — on the contrary, it means that we must be protect our mission to pursue research and creative practice without political interference. In this piece published this week by Inside Higher Education, I argue that in our time of populist authoritarianism we have a duty to be anti-fascists. We can do so, I argue, while also protecting the intellectual diversity necessary for liberal education.

 

Historian and author Ibram X. Kendi has powerfully argued that it is not enough to be “race neutral” in the United States. It is not enough to say “I am not a racist” and to hope for a position of neutrality. “There is no neutrality in the racism struggle,” Kendi writes. “The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘antiracist.’” Trying to ignore race contributes to white supremacy. Antiracism is necessary for combating it.

The same goes for fascism. There is no neutrality with respect to the resurgent populist authoritarianism one sees in this country and in so many others. It is not enough even to say one is for freedom, or for greater equality, or for peace and justice — for if those things are the case, one must now step up as an antifascist. This is particularly true in higher education.

Fascism has taken different forms in various times and places, but it consistently has certain core ingredients. It promises the return to a mythic greatness and an escape from the corrupt, weak and feminized present. It creates an enemy or a scapegoat whose elimination or domination will allow for those true, full members of society to thrive. And it attacks ideas, science and education in the name of a deeper, pure belonging.

The philosopher Jason Stanley has recently described these aspects of fascism as the “politics of us and them.” Decades ago, Italian novelist and theorist Umberto Eco underscored that for the fascists reasoned inquiry is seen as an enterprise for the weak — for losers — while philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that fascism “relies on a total substitution of lies for truth.” For the fascist, disagreement is treason, and fascist politicians attempt to co-opt law enforcement and the military for their political purposes. Sound familiar?

The appearance of fascist politics in the United States is not exactly new, but what is new is the alignment of this politics with the force of the federal government. For those of us who work at colleges and universities, this raises the stakes in our efforts to provide students with the tools of intellectual critique and creative practice. Many faculty members will want to continue “their own work” because it seems to have little to do with contemporary political issues. While not supporting what they might see as a populist authoritarianism, even nascent fascism, they may not think politics directly relevant to their teaching and research in mathematics, microeconomics, neuroscience or Victorian literature. These folks would rightly reject being themselves labeled “fascist,” but they might see no reason to take a stand and become antifascists.

Same goes for university administrators, especially presidents, like me. College presidents are supposed to be nonpartisan, and they generally agree that it is vital for the educational enterprise that campuses should accommodate a wide range of political views and encourage meaningful conversation among groups with different values and ideas. But it has never been enough to simply declare one’s campus a marketplace of ideas in which truth wins out. One must work actively to ensure intellectual diversity and robust discussion about enduring questions. Given the strong tilt of professors to one side of the political spectrum on many campuses, faculty leaders and administrators should proactively encourage the study of serious issues related to the themes from libertarian, religious and conservative traditions. The defense of freedom of speech or of intellectual meritocracy alone does not do the job. We need to curate broad conversations so as to create greater intellectual diversity, and some people in higher education have started to do so.

Today intellectual diversity is threatened by forces much more sinister than the leftist musings of tenured humanists, and so today, we administrators and professors must become antifascists. Supporting free inquiry and expression in the abstract is all well and good, but when peaceful protesters are being beaten and gassed, we need to do more. Being open to people of different backgrounds is certainly a virtue, but when the forces of order are encouraged to dominate the streets, we must become sanctuaries for those targeted by the state because of their race or ethnicity. We must call out and reject appeals for the violent suppression of dissent, and we must interrupt the appropriation of religious traditions to legitimate a regime that persecutes others in order to animate its political base and hide its own corruption. We must defend free inquiry and scientific institutions from their abuse by political hacks fueled by myths of macho violence. To try today to stand apart from these issues, to take the posture of the apolitical, is today to take the posture of complicity, whether that be in relation to racism or violent authoritarianism.

We can resist the anti-intellectual, tyrannical tendencies of the moment in many ways — without embracing the so-called Antifa movement, itself sometimes a bastion of intolerance. Some of us will take to the streets to protest against racist state violence; others will mobilize people to participate in local, state and national elections. In stepping up forthrightly as an antifascist, the student who is upset by growing economic inequality can stand together with the business leader concerned for the welfare of employees and customers; with the science professor appalled by the dismissal of facts; with the abused member of a scapegoated community; with the conservative distressed by the undermining of the Constitution; with the worshipper insulted by the use of religion for political purposes; with the law-abiding citizen disturbed by the threat to the rule of law; with the veteran made anxious by the misuse of the military; with the university president defending the integrity of the educational enterprise.

All these and many more can step up as antifascists while maintaining a commitment to listening to people with whom they might disagree. Such listening is a skill we cannot do without if we are to practice democracy. The alternative is to resign ourselves to currying favor with those who would dominate through violence and exclusion.

There will be those who disagree, thinking university presidents and professors should do their best to avoid the political fray. I certainly have sympathy with scholars and students who just want to study in peace. But just as now is the time to fight racism in our institutions, now the time has come to defend our very right to study, to critique and to create in peace. The time has come to become antifascists — while we still have the freedom to do so.

Juneteenth and Hopes for the Future

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Today is Juneteenth, a holiday celebrating freedom and African American culture. In this time of intense examination of racism and the legacies of inequality in this country, we here at Wesleyan are buoyed today by the proclamation from Mayor Ben Florsheim ’14 and our partners in the City of Middletown (including Professor Jesse Nasta ’07 and Armani White ’15). The proclamation officially establishes June 19—also known as Freedom Day, Liberation Day, Jubilee Day, or Juneteenth—as America’s Second Independence Day, and underscores “our shared commitment to the spirit of the holiday through our words and our deeds.”

It’s important to mark positive steps, particularly in dark times. We were heartened this week by the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the protections for the 700,000 young immigrants protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Years ago, Wesleyan purposefully began admitting more DACA students, and they have contributed so much to our campus. In 2016, we declared ours a sanctuary campus as an extension of that commitment.

Earlier in the week, we were also encouraged by the Supreme Court’s ruling that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act extends to gender identity, helping to protect all our friends in the LGBTQ+ community against discrimination. As Jenny Boylan ’80 wrote: “What are these special rights I want? The same ones everybody else has. What is my gay agenda? It is the hope to live my life in peace.”

A pandemic has helped many of us focus on those who are most vulnerable, those who have continued to struggle to be safe, to be healthy, to be free. Today’s holiday and the Court’s recent decisions remind us that we must continue to defend all members of our community, especially those burdened by histories of oppression and systems of marginalization.

This morning I was on a call with Clifton Watson, who directs our Jewett Center for Community Partnerships, and Katja Kolcio, the incoming Director of the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life. We spoke of E2020, Wesleyan’s program to promote learning through civic participation. The energy we see around us inspires us to work for change, and to learn from listening to others about how best to make our lives in common more inclusive, equitable and humane.

Happy Juneteenth!

 

 

Hopes for Opening Wesleyan in Fall 2020

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The following message concerning our plans for the fall went out to the Wesleyan community this week. As we said some time ago, we’ve been aiming at an announcement about activating our campus for early July, but we thought an update on our points of focus would be helpful at this point. Shortly after the July 4th weekend, we still intend to release much more information about our plans for residential life, hybrid classes, athletics, testing and other health precautions.

We understand that many families will wait until they see those details, and the public health conditions unfolding this summer, before making a definitive commitment about attending the University in the fall. Our request below about deferrals is just to give the planning team some idea of students’ thinking at this point, as we have shared our thinking now. 

Recognizing this is an evolving situation, we will continue to provide updates on our plans. 

 

Dear friends,

What a spring it has been! The specter of bigotry has been viciously apparent in the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and the energy of anti-racism has swept across the nation in demonstrations in large cities and small towns. At the same time, much uncertainty remains as the pandemic continues to increase in intensity in several states. Amidst all the pain, anger and anxiety, we have continued to plan, and I write now with an update on our thinking thus far. Given the current public health trajectory for Connecticut, we are hoping to welcome most students, faculty and staff back to Middletown in safe conditions in late August. One thing we are certain about: it will be good to be together again—safely—on campus.

Our abiding priority is the health and safety of every member of our community, especially the most vulnerable among us, and the realities of the current pandemic mean that this coming semester will be unlike those of the past. Wesleyan is developing protocols in accordance with the expert guidance that best suits our particular situation.

Our contingency planning workgroup is proposing for the 2020 fall semester classes to begin on campus August 31 (one week earlier than initially scheduled) with the possibility of finishing online after Thanksgiving (when there would be just one more week of classes). We will limit visitors to and excursions from campus, and we have more time together during the warmer months of the year. We are developing plans for science labs and art studios, and we expect to offer our athletes on-campus programs. Food services and residence halls will be organized with safety in mind, as will our classrooms and co-curricular activities. For those students unable to return to campus at all this fall, distance- and hybrid-learning options will be available.

We will release much more information about the fall term in early July, but here are some of the key elements in our plan for campus reactivation:

  • Health and Safety—The planning workgroup is working out details for testing, monitoring and contact tracing in close adherence to CDC guidelines. We will implement thorough protocols to limit and document visitors to campus (including tours, lectures and events), as well as to notify the campus community of confirmed cases and community members who may have been in contact with someone who tests positive. Additionally, the University is meticulously following state and federal guidelines for personal protective equipment (including wearing masks in public places), indoor air quality and disinfection protocols.
  • Return to Campus—The workgroup has created a phased approach for reactivating campus that prioritizes student-facing and faculty-support positions to meet the demands of the scheduled August 31 start of classes. This approach allows ample time between phases and employs proper social distancing protocols according to State of Connecticut guidelines. The University will explore telecommuting as an alternative to traditional work arrangements for appropriate positions, and we will make the greatest possible accommodations for staff in high-risk categories. Alternative work arrangements for faculty will include teaching in a variety of in-person, hybrid and distance pedagogies. We continue to work through all available options for critical services for our community—child, family and dependent care prominent among these—and we will provide updates as soon as we have them.
  • Travel–Once students return to campus, we are asking that they not make excursions to any areas where the incidence of COVID is increasing. Our current expectation is that University-funded travel will remain suspended for the fall semester, and members of the campus community who have personal travel scheduled may be asked to take additional precautions before returning to campus.
  • Deferrals—We hope it will be a traditional semester, but we also expect to offer robust remote alternatives, should they be helpful for some students. If you intend to ask for a leave for any part of the academic year, for planning purposes we ask that all students notify Student Affairs of their plans for the fall semester by June 30.
  • Student Accounts and Financial Aid—As the University continues to refine its plans for the upcoming academic year, we are delaying the release of the fall semester bill and the financial aid award notices related to it. We will provide an update on charges and financial aid immediately following the announcement in July. In related news, Wesleyan is in the process of upgrading its online Student Account Center to a simpler and more user-friendly online student account management portal. Details of the new system are available on our website.

Wesleyan will take the necessary precautions and abide by available guidance from medical experts to keep our campus and the surrounding communities safe. But we cannot do it alone. Each of us must play a role and adhere to safety protocols, and we expect to issue specific guidelines to that end which all returning students, faculty and staff will be required to follow.

In closing, it’s important to note that all of these plans are contingent upon the public health context. We will continue to provide updates and additional information throughout the summer, and we encourage you to attend the Zoom forum tomorrow, June 16, for faculty and staff at 10 a.m., where I will be available to answer questions. As we continue to work through the details of reactivating campus, we will send another email update in July to address our plans with greater specificity.

Though we have proven time and again that Wesleyan is much more than buildings and classrooms, there is no denying that learning together in these spaces, in person, amplifies our mutual understanding and the impact of our work. I look forward to our return.

Build an Anti-Racist Community in Which Hatred and Intolerance Have No Place

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Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. We speak their names with sorrow and with anger. In recent weeks, we confront once again the fact that in America some people so radically devalue African Americans that their lives can be just brutally destroyed. The precarity of black lives has a very long history in this country, but now technology makes it possible for people everywhere to witness violent injustice. We witness, and we are disgusted; we witness, and we are enraged; we witness, and we mourn. Black Lives Matter.

As a historically white institution, Wesleyan has struggled with our own history of racism. Over the last several decades, thanks to the work of activist students, faculty, staff and alumni, we have become more aware of the ways in which the ideology of white supremacy has affected this history and our own present. We try to build a different kind of community – one in which racism, hate and intolerance have no place. This is an ongoing project, and we re-dedicate ourselves to it.

Our Wesleyan education includes the aspiration to act “for the good of the world.” Rejecting hatred and the violence it inspires, we can engage with others to construct alternatives to poverty, marginalization and prejudice. We witness and we choose how to respond; let us do so in ways that prefigure the kind of world we hope to build.

With compassion and solidarity,

Michael Roth, President

 

President’s Cabinet

David Baird, Vice President for Information Technology

Amin Abdul-Malik Gonzalez, Vice President and Dean of Admissions

Anne Martin, Chief Investment Officer

Sean McCann, Chair of the Faculty

Nicole Lynn Stanton, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

Andrew Y. Tanaka, Treasurer and Senior Vice President

Michael Whaley, Vice President for Student Affairs

Alison P. Williams, Vice President for Equity and Inclusion

Frantz Williams, Jr. Vice President for Advancement

David Winakor, General Counsel and Secretary of the University

Renell Wynn, Vice President for Communications

 

Commencement Thoughts

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Last weekend we had a remarkable Commencement… with only a few students and families in attendance along with some staff, and with a few thousand watching online. It was both very sad and very moving to look out over the almost empty field and try to imagine all the seniors, full of accomplishment, being cheered on by their families. And the cheers were there, echoing for us across the miles.

You can listen to my remarks here. The honorary doctorate recipients had important messages to share. Rev. Dr. William Barber challenged graduates to have a positive impact on the world by working for social justice: So I want to issue you a challenge to be instruments of change. To use your degrees, your education, your influence, your intelligence, to be instruments of change.” Brad Whitford ’81 emphasized the importance of civic engagement and our connections to one another: “If we learn anything from this pandemic, it must be that we are all connected on this delicate little planet. And I hope that the pernicious myth of separateness that lies at the root of so much oppression and injustice in this world must finally be obliterated.” Finally Jacqueline Woodson underscored her belief in the power of the graduates to do good in the world: “I see your brilliance. And I see the way you are doing the hard work already and changing the world already. And I just love young people so much, and I love what y’all are doing, and I love who you’re becoming, and I love what this world is going to be because of you.” 

Lots more about Commencement 2020 here— and I especially recommend Caroline Bhupathi’s thoughtful message to her classmates.

 

 

 

 

Finals End, Spring Continues

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Many people have noticed what Joni Mitchell sang about: “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” Okay, boomer, I guess, but I have certainly been feeling that lately as I walk around the campus; everything is familiar but for the feel of being on a movie set, or an empty stage. We miss the vibrancy, and the tumult; we look for the small groups engaged in vigorous conversations or large groups cheering on the achievements of friends. Instead, we wave to the those out for a stroll (usually with masks), or heading to pick up food at Usdan, or just taking in the sun at Foss Hill. No pings of baseball bats…just a couple of exercisers running up, walking down. Running up….

We’ve been looking forward to spring for months, haven’t we? And now that it’s here, I am looking forward to welcoming our students, staff and faculty back to campus (I hope, in the fall). Our plans are to reduce the risk of contagion and to have the capacity to take care of anyone who does get infected while tracing their contacts. So far, things are going well in Connecticut and in Middletown. But we watch the trajectory of pandemic and prepare. More updates will come in June, and then a decision about how we will proceed in July.

Meanwhile, the campus is beautiful, if lonely. And we have here our new puppy, Lola, whom we just introduced to Foss Hill.

We Miss the Campus Amplification of Liberal Learning

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I recently published this piece in the Hechinger Report.

“Nothing ever changes in academia,” the refrain goes. “Universities still teach the same way they did in the Middle Ages!” Usually I hear this tune from folks in the business world.

Trustees at Wesleyan University, where I am president, have for years been singing the siren’s song to professors about the benefits of online teaching, and usually the answer they get is: “It just doesn’t work.” Well, things in academia are changing now! The coronavirus has upended our plans and our prejudices. Students have left their campuses, and entire curricula have shifted into distance-learning mode.

“Things will never be the same in higher education!” is the refrain of the moment, and not just in the business world. Those who expected radical disruption in the wake of the Great Recession now seem to believe that it’s the coronavirus that will lead to a massive migration of students away from in-person learning and toward the promised land of tech-infused distance education.

Of course, millions of students had already moved to online courses over the last several years, in programs that were either aimed at specific skill-building or in programs that offered greater flexibility (and affordability) than can typically be found in on-campus settings. But despite growth in the numbers and sophistication of online options, high school seniors continue to apply for the opportunity to learn with one another on a college campus. Will the 2020 coronavirus pandemic change that?

I myself was teaching a class on campus, “The Modern and the Postmodern,” that I am now teaching remotely. I’d already adapted this class in 2013 as one of Coursera’s free online humanities offerings. In our current stay-at-home period, more than a thousand people have joined the pre-recorded version of this class each week. For me, it was pretty easy to imagine how I’d supplement the online pre-recorded lectures from my MOOC with discussions with Wesleyan students on the Zoom platform. Although we record these discussions, almost all of my 50+ undergraduates attend class together. We’ve been talking about Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf and Michel Foucault in our first weeks online, and the students have been as insightful as ever in connecting these texts to their own situations.

My colleagues report similarly positive experiences. Even those who used to chide me about leaving intimate education behind in offering MOOCs seem to be finding real value in teaching remotely on a platform that allows for discussion as well as lectures. Professors all over the country have been sharing tips on making their online educational environments as interactive and potent as possible.

I’ve been particularly impressed by suggestions that lead to more active learning (or project-based learning) among students who are scattered across great distances. I never found the right way to do that in my MOOCs because there were so many students enrolled and they were not moving through the material together. But I see now there are many more ways to do this than I’d imagined — from collaborations on science problems to coordinating music ensembles. I recently “attended” a fabulous pipe organ class recital, now displaced onto the various kinds of instruments student have at home. The problem wasn’t just the platform, it was my own limitations as a creative teacher.

At this point, undergraduates seem able to get hold of the material and address the tasks assigned on the syllabus. Seminar discussions on Zoom, Teams or Google Hangouts can be lively, lectures can be understood, and breakout sessions and team projects can be completed. Still, many students want nothing more than to be back on campus.

A cynic might say that the entitled young people miss their climbing walls and their beer pong, their lazy rivers and their bar-hopping, and surely some do miss the social bonds that form in the recreational dimensions of the college experience. But students are finding they miss a lot more than that. They miss the opportunities that campuses provide to amplify the straightforward instruction from classes via serendipitous encounters, informal discussion and collaborative discovery.

Sure, classes convey information about molecular biology or World War II, macroeconomics or social psychology, but the lessons are amplified and become resonant as students talk about them in the cafeteria, before sports events, in the library or in the dormitory lounge. Campuses provide homes for students, to be sure, but they also are environments in which the specifics that one learns are integrated into who one is as a person and into what one comes to think and believe as a member of a community.

On a campus, students encounter other people learning, and even when the subject of discussion isn’t a class, the lessons of a liberal education resonate into multiple dimensions of their lives. For faculty, too, the opportunity to talk with colleagues and with students outside of class amplifies the continuous learning that is their calling.

We are unlikely to see a massive migration away from campuses as a result of more students and teachers having “discovered” distance learning. But professors are likely to use a wider array of digital tools so as to make their in-person teaching on campus as compelling as possible. Tools in liberal education may be changing, but its essential mission — its core task of empowering the whole person — is not.

We Americans can sometimes gravitate toward efficient transactions, but education is impoverished — not made frictionless — when it is reduced to isolated exchanges among people in predetermined boxes (even when those boxes are on a computer screen).

Our goal as teachers should be to facilitate the amplification of what we teach so that what students learn resonates more fully in their lives. In this way, the skills that students build will strengthen them not just in building successful careers but also in searching for meaning and connection in their years beyond the university.

Choosing Your (Our) University

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Throughout the spring, high school seniors with the acceptance letters in hand, normally visit campuses as they try to decide where to attend college. They are trying to envision the school at which they will be most likely to thrive. Where will I learn the most, be happiest, and form friendships that will last a lifetime? How to choose? As I do each spring, I thought it might be useful to re-post my thoughts on choosing a college, with a few revisions for this season of pandemic. The most important issue this year for many will be that they cannot visit schools to get a feel for the campuses where they might live. Schools are offering online substitutes, but it’s hard to pick when one doesn’t get to feel one’s reaction. I invite you to visit our Admitted Students website to learn more about Wesleyan.

Many students today are wondering whether campuses will be open in the fall, and I am hopeful that Wesleyan (like other schools our size) will have a normal academic year. Sure, we expect to take more health precautions than ever before, and we will be building our capacity to test members of our community, to provide supportive isolation to those who fall ill, and to minimize opportunities for the spread of any illnesses. In the months ahead we are preparing to provide a safe, robust and holistic education to our students come the fall semester.

Of course, for many the decision will be made on an economic basis. Which school has given the most generous financial aid package? Wesleyan is one of a small number of schools that meets the full financial need of all admitted students according to a formula developed over several years. Wesleyan has made a commitment to keep loan levels low and to maintain only moderate (very close to inflation) tuition increases. We also offer a three-year program that allows families to save about 20 percent of their total expenses, while still earning the same number of credits.

After answering the question of which schools one can afford, how else does one decide where best to spend one’s college years? Of course, size matters.  Some students are looking for a large university in an urban setting where the city itself plays an important role in one’s education. New York and Boston, for example, have become increasingly popular college destinations, but not, I suspect, for the classroom experience. But if one seeks small classes and strong, personal relationships with faculty, then liberal arts schools, which pride themselves on providing rich cultural and social experiences on a residential campus, are especially compelling. You can be on a campus with a human scale and still have plenty of things to do. Wesleyan is somewhat larger than most liberal arts colleges but much smaller than the urban or land grant universities. We feel that this gives our students the opportunity to choose a broad curriculum and a variety of cultural activities on campus, while still being small enough to encourage regular, sustained relationships among faculty and students.

All the selective small liberal arts schools boast of having a faculty of scholar-teachers, of a commitment to research and interdisciplinarity, and of encouraging community and service. So what sets us apart from one another after taking into account size, location, and financial aid packages? What are students trying to see when they visit Amherst and Wesleyan, or Tufts and Pomona?

As students scan the Wesleyan website, go to chatrooms and listen to current students talk about their experiences, I hope our they feel the brave exuberance and ambition of our students, the intelligence and care of our faculty, the playful yet demanding qualities of our community. I would like prospective students to get a sense our commitment to creating a diversity in which difference is embraced and not just tolerated, and to public service that is part of one’s education and approach to life. Our students have the courage to find new combinations of subjects to study, of people to meet, of challenges to face.

Whatever college or university students choose, I hope they get three things out of their education: discovering what they love to do; getting better at it; learning to share it with others. I explain a little bit more about that in this talk to admitted students a few years ago:

We all know that Wesleyan is hard to get into, but even in the group of highly selective schools, Wes is not for everybody. We aspire to be a community committed to boldness as well as to rigor, to idealism as well as to effectiveness. Whether in the sciences, arts, humanities or social sciences, our faculty and students are dedicated to explorations that invite originality as well as collaboration. The scholar-teacher model is at the heart of our curriculum. Our faculty are committed to teaching and to shaping their disciplines. At Wesleyan, we know how to work hard, but we also know how to enjoy the work we choose to do. That’s been magically appealing to me for more than 30 years. I bet the magic will appeal many of those who are still in the process of getting to know our extraordinary university.

Two Wesleyan Lives: Victor Gourevitch and Andrew Stuerzel

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This past week I had the experience of mourning two Wesleyan friends in very different circumstances. The first was my beloved teacher Victor Gourevitch, who died on April 14 at the age of 94. The second, devastatingly unexpected loss was my colleague and friend Andrew Stuerzel, Wesleyan Class of 2005, who passed away after a medical emergency on April 17th. Andrew was 37.

 

I studied ancient philosophy, political philosophy and, most memorably, Hegel with Victor from 1976-1978. He was intense and challenging, and he cared deeply about opening his students’ thinking to enduring questions and problems. He was a student of the German-Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss, and he remained dedicated to what Victor called the zetetic dimension of Strauss’s thought. A few years after I graduated, we worked together on publishing the letters between Strauss and the Russian/French Hegelian Alexandre Kojève (in Strauss’s On Tyranny). While many other American students of Leo Strauss went on to a pious celebration of conservatism and the market economies of modern democratic regimes, Victor was a lifelong opponent of this reductionist approach to political philosophy. He was also an opponent of both the naive and the authoritarian forms of what’s called progressive thinking. A man of immense learning, Victor could be ruthlessly critical of the cliches we use to get along (or to bring others along), and he could also be enormously generous to those who were willing to open their minds and hearts to inquiry. Some of his great friends were artists and musicians devoted to experimentation and creativity, or philosophers with whom he strongly disagreed. Along with his wife Jacqueline (who taught painting at Wesleyan for many years), he was among the most hospitable, gracious people I’ve known. I am so grateful for his teaching and his friendship.

 

A day after Victor’s burial, I received the shocking news that Andrew Stuerzel ’05 had collapsed and passed away during a visit to Middletown. Not long after graduating from Wesleyan (and traveling in Asia), Andrew joined our Office of Admission. In 2012 he moved over to University Relations, first as a Major Gift Officer and then as Associate Director for International Advancement. As an undergraduate at Wesleyan, Andrew played baseball, rugby, and earned the NESCAC All-American Award for football. Andrew’s major was East Asian Studies and, following graduation, he completed Stanford University’s advanced Japanese Language Program. After 10 years at Wes, Andrew decided to pursue a new position this past January with Boston Children’s Hospital.

I got to know Andrew when we traveled together in Asia. He seemed to me indefatigable—always ready for a new adventure, taking on a new assignment, curious about some new place to visit. He was enormously helpful as a colleague, and he established deep and lasting friendships with alumni and parents of Wes students all over the world. We enjoyed many a meal together (and suffered together with food poisoning) as we sang the praises of alma mater in order to raise support for its programs. His easy smile and authentic exuberance made him a cherished colleague to so many of us.

Andrew was a devoted husband to his wife, Adriana Rojas ’07, and loving father to children, Reese and Marco. He will be sorely missed by many. Family and friends have created a Gofundme page in his honor.

There are so many losses these days, and they are even harder to bear in our isolation from one another and our traditional rituals of mourning. If you are grieving, I hope you remember there is a community of Wesleyan support. Reach out, take care of one another, and take care of yourselves.

 

Post updated with corrected dates.