Classes Online Begin

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I conducted my first class yesterday since moving to an online format for the rest of the semester. I have to admit that I was pretty nervous about the transition to Zoom, even though I’ve offered lectures online before. My class, The Modern and the Postmodern, is available on Coursera for free, and more than a hundred thousand people have participated in it over the last few years. I’ve asked my Wesleyan students (52 of them) to sign up for those recorded lectures.

But this morning at 10:50 (Eastern time) we were all online together, and I have to say I found it moving to see all those familiar faces — even if they were in little boxes on my screen. And they seemed glad to be together, even if their togetherness was merely virtual.  At first, I tried to reassure them that we were all aware of the stress of the moment, that we would try our best to learn together, that deadlines were flexible and anyone could choose to switch to a Pass/Fail mode. I saw nod and smiles…and then we got started with the text of the week, Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. I wish I had a more optimistic text for them, but perhaps reading about recurrent patterns of conflict, guilt and aggression will put our current predicament into a broader perspective. In any case, next week we look forward to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

I’ve heard from other Wesleyan professors that their classes also started out well. A colleague in the languages told me that her students, too, were so happy to be re-connected. She reported that “various pets that might walk in front of the camera or bark at inopportune times” were introduced to the group.   “We shared their names and a fun fact about them. Again, in the target language.” A relatively new member of our teaching corps wrote me to say that he found the online meeting with students “wonderfully therapeutic for my own soul.” Another long-term faculty member wrote (with some surprise, I think) that a department meeting via Zoom went smoothly, and that he was in touch with students all over the world. “This is going to work out,” he said.

Like the students in my class, these colleagues and students all expressed the desire to be back home at Wesleyan — back in their classrooms, Usdan, the gym, their libraries, houses, labs and dorms. We are all looking forward to that. Meanwhile, here’s a picture I took yesterday as an early spring snow began to fall on Foss Hill.

Early spring snow on a lonely Foss Hill

 

Working Ever More Closely Together

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We need to physically isolate from one another; that much is very clear in these uncertain times. And in uncertain, stressful times many of us crave connecting with one another. We crave a friend’s embrace, a colleague’s pat on the back, a warm introduction to someone we are eager to get to know. Stopping the spread of this virus is hard because we must stop doing some of those things that really enhance our lives. These things are core to why we believe a residential educational experience is so enriching. They are the things that our students are already missing as almost all of them depart from campus, often tearfully.

They will also miss the kinds of activities that offer deep learning through physical practice. I’m not just talking about sports (which folks already miss), but also about playing in the gamelan orchestra or raising one’s voice along with the Ebony Singers. We are working hard on finding virtual ways to provide learning experiences that usually come from physical practice – whether with instruments, lab equipment, bodies or voices – and we are excited about the prospects. I have been so impressed by (and grateful to) my colleagues on the faculty who are figuring out how to match online learning pedagogies to the content of the courses and their own pedagogical practices. Teachers and students will learn a lot about what can (and cannot) be done at a distance – and things to be grateful for (once taken for granted) when normal classes resume.

It’s only been about a week since we announced that Wesleyan would suspend normal operations, and already so much has happened. After the initial shock and disappointment, there followed daily examples of sacrifice, cooperation and mutual understanding. Our friends and colleagues across the University have been stepping up in a big way. The Student Life and Equity and Inclusion teams have gone so far beyond the call of duty as they support students from an extraordinary range of circumstances. Public Safety officers, Investment staff, and Bon Appetit workers, Physical Plant, Technology, Library and Advancement and Finance colleagues…so many have found ways to contribute to student well-being while also planning for the future. Communications folks are working overtime to keep all our constituencies informed, and HR is looking after the welfare of all our employees. Admission and Financial Aid staff members, on top of everything else, are crafting the class of 2024 and planning a virtual WesFest!

Wesleyan University has weathered crises before, and we have done so by coming together to support one another. We begin with our most vulnerable students. We will ensure that work-study funds and other forms of financial aid are distributed for the remainder of the semester, and we have raised significant monies for the Emergency Fund. There is an application process for this support, but it is simple and straightforward. We are already distributing money. And for those who can, it’s easy to make a donation! (Kari and I just did.)

I feel the sadness of those whose college experience has been so rudely interrupted. I see some of those students on Foss Hill (6 feet apart) early in the morning, catching a last sunrise over the Connecticut River. I see others getting a grab-and-go meal at Usdan, or having one more WesWings delight, before sorrowfully waving goodbye to friends. We’ll do our best to keep the students safe who must remain on campus. Seniors, we’ll figure out how to celebrate your accomplishments, whether as planned in May or, if need be, at some later date.

We’ll miss all who had to leave, but we’ll be ready to welcome students back when the threat of the pandemic recedes. What a joy that will be! Meanwhile, be safe and stay well!!

Students Heading to Physical Isolation, Faculty Re-Tooling Classes

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These are strange times, indeed. It’s the middle of spring break, but the campus is emptying out for the rest of the semester. Friends are saying goodbye in Middletown, or expressing sadness at already being so far apart. Anxiety hovers over us all as we deal with the disappointment of finishing our school year through distance learning while we yearn for connections with one another. But it’s the connections that put us at risk.

Well, it’s physical connections that put us at risk. We can — we must — connect with one another in other ways. In the coming weeks, we will share academic work through various platforms online, and we will talk to our friends, share music, photos and stories through our lively networks. In addition to the new materials we will generate, there are many videos, works of art and music already available through the Wesleyan website. We can watch them together, and we can find ways to talk about them — even at a great distance. It won’t be the same as sitting around Usdan, or chatting by the gym, or hanging in a wood frame, but it will preserve some of our connectivity. We don’t have to be isolated from one another in spirit.

Many of you will keep journals during this period — some in notebooks, others in podcast form, while others in videos. We will find ways to connect people registering their experiences. We want to hear from you. More on this soon.

Students are stepping up in big ways to help one another, and faculty and staff are finding ways to support those who need it the most. There are various efforts underway to give assistance to those at risk. No surprise, I prefer using official channels to ad hoc, if well-meaning, private projects.  Students who need emergency funding are asked to contact Dean Mike Whaley (mwhaley@wesleyan.edu). Members of the extended Wesleyan family who want to donate to the fund can do so here.

It’s a frightening time, to be sure. But we will depend on one another, deepen our connections with one another, so that when we come back to campus, we will be the stronger for having gone through all this.

 

Working Together in Anxious Times

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Yesterday I sent the following note to all faculty and staff at Wesleyan. These folks have been working tirelessly to help our students through this crisis while also dealing with the threats posed by the epidemic. I am so grateful for their efforts!

 

Dear friends,

As you prepare for a weekend of ‘socially distanced’ activities, I wanted to thank everyone for their extraordinary efforts at making Wesleyan’s response to the current crisis as humane and responsible as possible. Many faculty members have been actively sharing information about how to move their classes into distant learning modes. Along with many others, I have learned much that will be relevant to my own class. Students, too, are preparing for learning in an uncertain future. Of course, many of them are deeply saddened to be torn away from friends and teachers, classmates and coaches. Yet, most are already figuring out how to continue to learn, and, eventually, to thrive. Countless staff members have been working with an intensity that is truly heroic as they prepare the campus and our students for the weeks ahead. The complexities of a diverse student body are everywhere apparent – from varieties of learning styles to a complex range of personal circumstances that require us always to customize. We have a framework of principles for making decisions, but I am so proud of the ways that we’ve tailored that framework for the specificity of individual students.

Faculty, students and staff – we are all educators at Wesleyan, and we are all especially attentive to the most vulnerable members of our community in this time of anxious planning and generous caring. I don’t want to overuse this phrase, but this seems to me ‘compassionate solidarity’ at work.

So, thank you for exemplifying the “independence of mind and generosity of spirit” signaled in the university’s mission statement. I am proud and grateful to be your colleague.

Yours ever,

Michael

Wesleyan Moves Classes Online and Asks Students to Leave Campus

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This week we posted this video and sent the following message to all Wesleyans. We have been dealing with individual questions over the last couple of days, and we are trying our best to provide support for those who most need it. A couple of things have come up often: 1. why do I have to come back to campus now to retrieve my stuff; 2. why did the university not just suspend school for 2 weeks at a time (as some other schools have done).

In answer to the first question, we do not encourage students to fly back to campus to retrieve their belongings. We will work with students and their families to make alternative arrangements. In answer to the second question: I carefully considered this approach, but the public health experts I consulted found it unrealistic, at best. The consensus of professional opinion is that conditions will only worsen, and I believe it will be least disruptive to our community to have a clear and consistent plan to complete the semester remotely. That said, I find it immensely sad to see our students deprived of the chance to thrive together on this campus we love. 

This is the kind of event that has happened once in a century. We must keep our community safe and our mission clear.

Here’s my message.

Dear friends,

This is a message I was hoping not to have to write.

With the CDC today reporting nearly 1,000 known cases of COVID-19 nationwide (having doubled since Monday) and Governor Ned Lamont declaring a public health emergency in Connecticut, it has become clear just how rapidly this potentially deadly virus is spreading. As hard as we work to make the on-campus Wesleyan experience the best it can be, we must apply that same diligence and care to protecting our community’s well-being in light of this growing threat.

After consulting with a variety of public health experts and other higher education institutions around the country, we are announcing the following preventive measures:

  • In-person classes have been suspended for the remainder of the spring semester; we will be transitioning all classes to distance learning models.
  • Undergraduate students who are able should return to campus through March 23 to gather their belongings; all students without University-approved alternate arrangements must depart campus by that time.
  • We know that there are students for whom Wesleyan is their only home. We have set up an online petition to work with them to make sure that access continues, as well as for students who would like to request an extension for picking up their belongings.
  • Students who cannot return to campus for their belongings should contact reslife@wesleyan.edu and staff will work directly with them on packing, storage or shipping solutions.

I am enormously grateful to staff for continuing their regular work schedules on campus to support these transitions and care for students for whom leaving is not an option. I also want to express the trust I have in our faculty and students to adapt to teaching and learning in this new mode. I have always known Wesleyan to be an inventive place that rises to new challenges, and I have every confidence that the remainder of the semester, while taking a much different form than in the past, will be successful.

While it may not diminish any sadness and frustration, it’s important to note that my colleagues and I have searched far and wide for ways to avoid this suspension of in-person classes and campus activities. Realizing that the closeness of our richly interactive community is what makes us more vulnerable to this disease has led us to this unhappy decision. And now, we are determined to find ways to empower student learning while most are away from campus.

We continue to update the central coronavirus/COVID-19 webpage with the latest available information, including a video message I have recorded explaining our rationale behind these decisions. Additionally, I would encourage everyone to review the list of Frequently Asked Questions we have compiled in anticipation of the many inquiries these decisions will understandably raise. Should you have further questions, please direct them to Covid-19Info@wesleyan.edu or call us at 1-888-675-2011 and we will respond as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

With thanks for your patience and understanding,

Spring Break but No Rest from our Anxious Times

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It’s usually the most chill part of the year – two weeks away from classes just as winter turns to spring. Wesleyan has a generous two-week break, though truth be told many faculty and students work hard during the change of season. Athletes are training or competing right through the time away from classes (how about that Men’s Hockey NESCAC Championship!); thesis writers are intensely moving their projects toward completion; professors often count on this period to make progress on their research. And the staff continues to labor away, planning everything from graduation to how to repair parts of campus strained by the first two-thirds of the academic year.

BUT THIS YEAR! This year we have a world seriously shaken by a pandemic, with repercussions ranging from a reeling global economy to changing how we casually greet one another. We are bombarded continuously with information, some of it very suspect. Authorities in Washington try to reassure, but conflicting (and sometimes nonsensical) pronouncements breed further confusion. State and local officials are scrambling to get current information, but the shortage of tests for Covid-19 has made this very difficult. Some schools are closing, and many organizations have canceled travel. Here at Wesleyan, hundreds of students—many of whom felt unsafe returning home—have stayed on campus for spring break, and we are asking everyone to contribute to a supportive community. We are also asking for social distancing. Oy.

To reiterate what we do know:

Similar to the flu, symptoms of coronavirus are mild to severe respiratory illness including:

  • Fever
  • Cough
  • Shortness of breath

At this time, the CDC reports that symptoms may appear in as few as two days or as long as 14 days after exposure.

The CDC recommends preventative actions to reduce the risk of developing the flu or other respiratory diseases, including:

  • Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds. Use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer that contains at least 60% alcohol if soap and water are not available.
  • Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth with unwashed hands.
  • Avoid close contact with people who are sick.
  • When you are sick, stay home.
  • Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash.
  • Clean and disinfect frequently touched objects and surfaces.

More information can be found here, and we will update this page frequently.

If you feel sick, please get assistance from the Davison Health Center. If you need help managing your anxiety and emotions in this stressful time, the folks at CAPS are there for you.

And wash your hands.

We have a good team working on contingency plans for classes and other events. We’ll get through this by relying on what we at Wesleyan call compassionate solidarity. We may be instructed in new forms of “social distancing,” but we’ll also take care of each other. Reach out. Help is nearby.

On Testimonies from Student Athletes

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Today, I read the powerful, devastating accounts of the awful experiences that several of alumnae members of the Wesleyan women’s cross-country team published in Wesleying. The Director of Athletics has asked for an investigation by the Office of Equity and Inclusion, and this will begin immediately. I apologize for the profoundly negative experiences that the women recount in their moving testimonies. As I await the results of the investigation, I promise that we will take all necessary steps to fix any systemic issues and to ensure the health and well-being of our student-athletes.

Michael Roth

Reviewing Susan Stewart’s “The Ruins Lesson”

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Recently The Washington Post published my review of Susan Stewart’s excellent The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture. As we contemplate the renovation of some of our historical buildings, the lessons of the built environment are much on my mind. I repost the review here.

 

How to explain our taste for ruins? Are we attracted to their echoes of transience and decay, and perhaps of our own mortality? Or are we moved by traces of a past that has not quite disappeared — messages from an era otherwise inaccessible? “We are so often drawn to the sight of what is broken, damaged and decayed,” notes Susan Stewart in her admirably researched and beautifully produced volume, “The Ruins Lesson.” Ruins excite our imagination with the lesson that our greatest structures will one day return to the ground, while reminding us that in their fallen states these sites are endowed with beauty, even redemption.

(University of Chicago Press)
(University of Chicago Press)

Stewart, a distinguished poet, a former MacArthur fellow and a Princeton professor of the humanities, charts the West’s fascination with decayed remains, from Egyptian relics to contemporary monuments of destruction and trauma. “The Ruins Lesson” is a sweeping cultural history that draws in Renaissance humanism, 18th-century changes in representing the past and the Romantic reconfiguration of memory. Our buildings, no matter how grand, are bound to fall. This is a lesson of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel; we are fated to live in a fallen, scattered state. God does not, Stewart notes, strike the builders mute, but they are condemned to a confusion of tongues, to the ruins of communication. For Western traditions, only the divine is preserved from decay; human achievement will always be marked by the inevitability of a fall.

Ruins are ripe for allegory, but they are also very material. Old stuff, even ancient stuff, can just get in the way, or it can be reused for new buildings. A classical pagan temple can be repurposed as a church; stones used to mark the advance of a historic empire can come in handy when you have to build a new wall. But sometime in the Renaissance, writers and artists began to see ruins, particularly Roman ruins, as having intrinsic value. Their antiquity was taken to be both beautiful and meaningful. Poets rhapsodized about the excavation of traces of the mighty empire more than 1,000 years after its fall. The corpse of the great city still breathes warnings, wrote the 18th-century Welsh poet and painter John Dyer. It’s often the poets, Stewart emphasizes, who “dream of making artworks that will not be vulnerable to the erosion that weather and time can wreak upon even the greatest of built human structures. Even so, the anxiety that their words, too, might not endure is palpable.”

At the center of Stewart’s study is the mid-18th-century artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi. The son of a Venetian stonemason, his effort to preserve ruins forever through printmaking illustrates the paradox implicit in the representation of decay. We are attracted to slowly falling buildings because they embody the effects of time passing, yet the artist attempts to defy time by creating a representation aimed at permanence. Piranesi strove for scientific rigor in his depiction of Roman ruins; he was determined to represent the exact proportions of architectural achievements from the past. Yet he was also determined to create art that would itself stand the test of time. He wanted to be at once faithful to the material artifacts and unbounded in his creative practice. As Stewart puts it, “Rarely has an artist been able to combine rationality, measure, and science with a near-melodramatic theatrical sense of presentation as Piranesi.” The artist’s many depictions of Roman ruins were so powerful that they came to define the experience of the past for those visiting the ancient sites — with some visitors afterward recalling Piranesi’s prints even more vividly than the ruins themselves.

In the 20th century, culture came to be seen as a ruin, a troubled witness to human violence. We are struck less by nature’s sublime powers than by the enormity of our capacity for ruination. The sentimental attachment to the ruin, the contemplative gaze that finds signs of renewal in mossy growth on broken stones, has been deconstructed. In our age of climate crisis, we might ask: When humans cause mass extinction, what does it mean to find beauty in decay?

“The Ruins Lesson” is in many respects a scholarly tome, with hundreds of footnotes and an extensive bibliography. But Stewart writes with poetic grace and a nonspecialist’s appreciation of printmaking, painting, literature and architecture. Readers outside the academy will find much to value in this lovely book. It takes no scholarly preparation to appreciate the ways in which culture-makers grappled with the lessons of decay even as they strove to create works of lasting value. The book is copiously illustrated, and the color prints powerfully illuminate the detailed descriptions of prints and paintings.

As part of the opening of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1997, I co-curated “Irresistible Decay,” an exhibition on ruins and their representations. It seemed worthwhile to recall the veneration of decay as we welcomed visitors to the beautiful new cultural center in the hills of Southern California. A museum can be like a monument, which Stewart reminds us “can be a temporary means of teaching the living about the past.” She goes on to conclude, though, that “it is only in the continual transmission of our values, in the life of thought, language, and critical reconsideration, that we can find any permanence.” With “The Ruins Lesson” she has made a critical and substantial contribution to that ongoing but fragile transmission.

The Ruins Lesson

Meaning and Material in Western Culture

By Susan Stewart

Chicago. 378 pp. $35

Committed to International Diversity

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With all the attention being devoted in recent weeks to the assassination of Suleimani and potential war with Iran, to Ukraine and impeachment, and to China and the coronavirus, it’s easy to lose sight of an isolationist trend in Washington worrisome in its own right. Although not everyone who wants to “make America great” means to cut it off from the rest of the world, the current regime’s isolationist instincts are powerful, persistent and perverse.

This came home to me during my recent trip to India to visit with Wesleyan families and to talk with prospective liberal arts students. Many told me that the United States seems less welcoming than before, and concerned parents wondered whether their children would feel at home in a country that seemed determined to cast foreigners in a harsh light. In some cases, they were attuned to this hostility because they saw their own government in Delhi using similar tactics. I tried to assure them that most Americans were open to meeting foreigners and that our traditions of hospitality remain strong. But they contrasted the current US climate with what they see in Canada, and to some extent in Australia.

Here at Wesleyan, we have a long tradition of collaboration with scholars and teachers from outside the United States. Nobel Prize winning chemist Satoshi Omura still looks back on his time as a researcher at Wes as formative to his experiments in developing new medicines from organic materials. African drummers like Abraham Adzenyah, Javanese gamelan virtuosos like Sumarsam, and dancers like Eiko Otake, have made Wes their home for decades because of its open learning environment, one that cultivates respect for tradition as well as enthusiasm for innovation. I proudly told my interlocutors in India about our longstanding Navaratri Festival of music and dance, and about the recent book by Hari Krishnan on how Bollywood creatively appropriated those traditions.

Shortly after I returned to campus, the Trump administration announced a new set of travel restrictions on people coming to the US. On Jan. 31 the President signed a proclamation banning visa applications from Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar and Nigeria. The reason given was that these countries presented risks because of their security procedures and information sharing. The administration’s announcement also included harsh immigration restrictions for people from Sudan and Tanzania.

The announcement is of a piece with the administration’s goal to restrict immigration of (almost) all kinds. For months in 2019, it refused to sign off on a new framework for refugees – the result being that in October ZERO refugees were legally admitted to the US. That’s the first time a month went by without the US providing legal refuge to someone. When President Trump eventually approved a legal ceiling for those seeking refuge here, it was for a mere 18,000 refugees, an all-time low. Even the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page complained in regard to the latest executive order that “punishing innocent people trying to come to America legally undermines Mr. Trump’s claim that he opposes illegal immigration, not immigrants more broadly.”

At Wesleyan, we value the vibrant, cosmopolitan community that we build in Middletown. About 15% of our students come from outside the US, and we cherish the opportunities to learn from one another. Rather than blocking off parts of the world from interactions with Americans, we believe in building positive, effective interconnectivity. Rather than refusing to listen to others we perceive as different from ourselves, we should cultivate the sharing of stories as a path to a broader more powerful education.

Let’s take Ahmed Badr’s ’20 Narratio project as our inspiration. Ahmed came to the US as a refugee from Baghdad and will graduate from Wesleyan in May. Determined to empower others, he created Narratio which invites youth around the world to share their stories  through the publishing of poetry, photography, art and narrative. Already Narratio has published 300+ works across 18+ countries.

Let’s push back against the anti-immigrant, anti-refugee messages coming from Washington. And let’s remember to listen to one another’s stories – lending an ear with special care to those that may come from faraway places.

 

 

 

Beginning the work of 2020!

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This morning I sent the following message to the campus community. Classes have begun, and we are looking forward to a great semester.

Over the past weeks, a number of our students have been traveling around the country as part of the new Wesleyan Engagement 2020 Initiative (E2020), which offers internship funding and credit to work in the public sphere during academic breaks. By facilitating students’ direct participation in civic life—and we expect many more to take advantage of E2020 in the spring and summer—we believe Wesleyan can help them gain valuable organizational skills and learn to engage more productively with others, even (or especially) those with whom they disagree.

While E2020 is a new initiative, its spirit has been part of Wesleyan’s DNA from the very beginning. In 1831, Wesleyan’s first president aimed our mission at both the good of the individual and the good of the world. In 1963, nine Wesleyan students traveled to the Deep South to assist with voter registration, the establishment of Freedom Schools, and their larger stated goal of “breaking the system of segregation in Mississippi.” Just last year, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of African American Studies at Wesleyan and the Vanguard Class of 1969, members of which advocated for more university support for the Black community here on campus and beyond. In recent months, we have eliminated our fixed investment allocation to fossil fuels, and in the coming year we will develop a new Sustainability Action Plan.

A decade ago, we named our strategic plan Wesleyan 2020, and now here we are! We’ve made important progress on all three of its overarching goals—enhancing the distinctive education we offer, growing the reputation of our extraordinary University, and making our economic model more sustainable. Faculty have spearheaded several new interdisciplinary colleges and exciting collaborations; Communications and Admission staff have effectively cultivated and recruited many new members to our community; and all those involved in the hugely successful THIS IS WHY fundraising campaign helped us strengthen our financial footing and position ourselves for a bright future.

Of course, some of the goals of Wesleyan 2020 are really FOREVER goals. Professors FOREVER seek to improve classroom success; Academic Affairs FOREVER seeks to make the curriculum more powerful and relevant; Student Affairs FOREVER seeks to ensure the student experience is meaningful and inclusive; and all those involved with University infrastructure and resources FOREVER seek to provide a stable platform for it all.

But we must also align our pursuit of these goals with our current circumstances and ambitions. As we work to update our strategic plan by the end of the calendar year, we must keep in mind that higher education—and Wesleyan, specifically—has always been fertile ground for bold and productive experimentation. We have a responsibility to find new ways to empower our students and our broader community to act for both the good of the individual and the good of the world. E2020 is one of the first steps in that direction, and the imperative to integrate civic engagement with liberal learning has rarely had the urgency that it has today. You can find out more about E2020 here.

In this spirit of developing civic preparedness, we will be honoring the civil rights legacy of the courageous activist Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Friday, January 31 (12:15 pm – 1:15 pm in Crowell Concert Hall). This year, our keynote speaker will be writer, producer and activist Bree Newsome.

I thank you for all your efforts and look forward to the exciting work ahead!