Basketball: We have the PLAYERS!

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The first half of the season has started off with a blast for both the men’s and women’s basketball teams. This week, players from each squad were chosen as NESCAC Players-Of-The-Week.

 

Maddie Bledsoe ’18 has had a most impressive start to the season. This past week she led the Cardinals to victory in the Courtyard by Marriott tournament. She averaged a double-double with 14.5 points and 14.0 rebounds in two wins over the University of Maine-Presque Isle (98-22) and Westfield State (88-76). On Friday, she scored 11 points on a perfect 5-of-5 shooting while also pulling in seven rebounds and dishing out four assists in 17 minutes of action. The following day, in the tournament championship game, she recorded career-highs of 18 points and 21 rebounds in the win over a strong Westfield State team. Maddie was 12-of-13 from the charity stripe and also dished out three assists, blocked a shot and recorded a steal. Maddie leads the conference in rebounding and has helped lead the team to its 5-1 record.

 

Jordan Bonner ’19 has been a scoring machine from the guard position. He has had at least 20 points in two road wins against Emmanuel (88-68) and highly ranked Williams to help keep the perfect season intact as Wesleyan improved to 6-0 on the year. In the win over the Saints, he dropped 21 points on 7-of-10 shooting while grabbing six rebounds, dishing out two assists and recording two steals. He concluded the week with a 22-point, five-rebound performance at Williams in which he scored six points in OT and converted clutch free throws down the stretch to seal the win.

Basketball players have a short break after this week’s games, and then there will be plenty of opportunities to see both teams play in the new year. Congratulations to Maddie and Jordan. Go WES!!

Final Push to the End of the Semester

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Although it seems like just a short time ago that I was writing about Arrival Day, we now suddenly find ourselves in the final week of the semester. Students are finishing class projects, professors are writing up exams and grading them, and the staff is working extra hard to support the entire community in this pressure-packed season. The weather is finally giving us signals that the season is indeed changing. No snow yet, but you can feel it won’t be long…

Soon I’ll be hosting the “December Completions” reception for students who are finishing up at Wesleyan mid-year. Some of these are students who took some time off, while others are undergraduates who are finishing a semester early. Each year a few more students are choosing the latter route, many through our three-year option. One can save a substantial amount of money on this program, while still getting the same array of academic offerings available to those who choose the eight-semester path.

There are lots of great events still to come as we get to the end of the semester. I’ll just mention the event at which Amanda Palmer ’98 and Michael Pope, along with the students from ‘The Art of Doing” course, will showcase their work. Amanda will perform on December 9th, and we’ll also get to see a music video students have made this term. You can find out more about the showcase here.

Good luck as the semester draws to a close!

 

#GivingTuesday: With You, More is Possible

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Now that we have expressed thanks, and, in many cases, shopped until we dropped, it’s time again to focus on Giving!  This is Wesleyan’s fourth year participating in #GivingTuesday. Thousands of Wesleyan alumni, parents, students and friends have chosen to make their donations on Giving Tuesday – and together, we have unlocked millions of dollars in matching funds for financial aid.

This year’s challenge – When 3,500 members of the Wesleyan community make gifts by Giving Tuesday, November 28, trustee Marc Casper ’90 will donate $300K to financial aid to support our students.

Giving is easy! Just visit the homepage for #GivingTuesday: www.wesleyan.edu/givingtuesday

Thanks in advance for making an impact by adding resources to financial aid!

 

A “Glad Position: Gratitude”

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The poet John Berryman’s poem “Minnesota Thanksgiving,” which I heard recited this morning on the radio, contains this happy phrase: “we stand again in debt/and find ourselves in the glad position: Gratitude.”

Gratitude is a glad position, and on Thanksgiving many assume it with a mixture of mirth and reverence. At Wesleyan, I know we have much to be thankful for. Our faculty and staff tap reservoirs of ingenuity to ensure that the education we offer remains vital with the energies of practical idealism. Our alumni are bound together through alma mater to generously support a school that inspires innovative aspirations to bravely face challenges and create opportunities. And our Wesleyan students, they discover their capacities for courage and creativity while exuberantly building a foundation for lifelong learning and friendship.

So much for which to be thankful! It is a glad position. Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Offensive Football!

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Hearty congratulations to Mike Breuler ’18 for being named both the NESCAC Offensive Player of the Year and the winner of the Boston Gridiron Club‘s top offensive football player in New England! Mike broke several receiving records at Wesleyan and was a standout player on a very strong team. Quarterback Mark Piccirillo ’19 seemed always to be able find Mike with passes only he could catch — or at least that he made sure he did catch. Mike graduates in the spring with an economics major and a film minor.

Congratulations!!

Support WESU & Free Form Radio Saturday Night!

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Today Professor Kehaulani Kauanui wrote to remind faculty about the fundraiser for WESU 88.1 FM — Wesleyan’s own free form radio station. I paste in her message here:

Join WESU for a dinner and show on Saturday, November 18 and help support community radio.  WESU’s Free Form Feast and Festival features a buffet meal plus a variety show. More than ten acts, featuring internationally acclaimed artists alongside student and community artists, will be donating their performances. Here is a link to purchase tickets.  The event will also feature a home-cooked Italian family style buffet generously donated by Zandri’s Stillwood Inn of Wallingford.

Tickets are $25 for the public and $10 for Students. Dinner, soft drinks, and a hot and cold beverage service are included along with the show.  All tickets sales directly support the station’s fall fundraising campaign. The event will be held on Wesleyan University’s campus at 55 Wyllys Ave, Middletown, CT 05457.

WESU has been providing creative, adventurous radio for more than 75 years. Please support the station!

Alums and Creative Writing

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Delighted to see that a graduate from the class of 2017 has recently published her debut novel with St. Martin’s Press. Jenny Fran Davis’s ’17 Everything Must Go has recently come out — the first of her two book deals with the prestigious publisher. In a recent interview Jenny says that:

“Most of the literary analysis that Flora does in the book comes out of work that I’ve done in classes at Wesleyan and in high school. It’s a really neat thing to be a student while writing a book, because you can slip into these modes of double-thinking, thinking as both a literary analyst and a writer. Suddenly everything you read is applicable and pertinent. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) and Emily Dickinson are foundational and contribute to a particular canon of writing by and about women, but I found myself thinking about more contemporary novels as I wrote, as well as media texts like newspaper and magazine articles (I read a ton of Rookie) and e-mails and texts from friends. I loved studying Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar), Jacqueline Susann (Valley of the Dolls), and Toni Morrison (Beloved and The Bluest Eye) with Sally Bachner in my Women’s Lib, Women’s Lit class, and reading Roxane Gay in a Writing through Trauma student forum was very exciting and momentum building.”

You can read the full interview here.

Jenny’s book is on the YA shelves, not far from that of another Wesleyan alum, Daniel Handler ’92. The creator of Lemony Snicket has a new novel out, All the Dirty Parts. Daniel’s “raunchy and original” novel is on my reading list for winter break, and it promises to be provocative and thoughtful.

Readers can also look forward to Shapiro-Silverberg Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing Amy Bloom‘s new novel, White Houses, to be published in the spring by Random House. Amy ’75 re-imagines the lives of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok — friends, lovers and participants in a grand historical moment. The novel is steeped in that history, and shines with beautiful, deeply felt prose.

I’ll just note one more work in progress: Quiara Alegria Hudes, Wesleyan’s Distinguished Professor of Writing and Theater, is away from campus working on a number of projects. Her plays, Water by the Spoonful and The Happiest Song Plays Last, are currently being staged in Portland. She wrote the book and lyrics for Miss You Like Hell, which will premiere at New York’s Public Theater in March.

There are PLENTY more alums doing great things in this sphere…. Add your favorites to the comments, if you’d like.

Volleyball Off to the NCAA Tournament!

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The Wesleyan Volleyball team won its first ever NESCAC tournament last week, knocking off top-seeded Tufts.

I met the vans when the teams reached campus Sunday night, and there were lots of happy faces (and one hurt knee!).

Winning the conference championship earned the Cardinals a trip to the national tournament, and at the end of this week, they will face Wellesley College. Whoever wins gets to rename the other school!

Go Wes!!

Nothing Inevitable about Latest Tragedy

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Last night the country was again shocked to learn of yet another mass killing. Even churches provide no sanctuary against people filled with hate who have access to deadly force. While the pace of American mass murder has increased, the political energy to do something about gun safety is harder to detect than ever. At Wesleyan within recent weeks, we heard from a variety of scholars about the history of guns in America, and we learned that a large majority of our fellow citizens favor regulations to promote gun safety. There is nothing, nothing inevitable about our rash of killing. Again, I quote from a statement from Connecticut’s Senator Chris Murphy:

“The paralysis you feel right now — the impotent helplessness that washes over you as news of another mass slaughter scrolls across the television screen — isn’t real. It’s a fiction created and methodically cultivated by the gun lobby, designed to assure that no laws are passed to make America safer, because those laws would cut into their profits. My heart sunk to the pit of my stomach, once again, when I heard of today’s shooting in Texas. My heart dropped further when I thought about the growing macabre club of families in Las Vegas and Orlando and Charleston and Newtown, who have to relive their own day of horror every time another mass killing occurs.

“None of this is inevitable. I know this because no other country endures this pace of mass carnage like America. It is uniquely and tragically American. As long as our nation chooses to flood the county with dangerous weapons and consciously let those weapons fall into the hands of dangerous people, these killings will not abate.

“As my colleagues go to sleep tonight, they need to think about whether the political support of the gun industry is worth the blood that flows endlessly onto the floors of American churches, elementary schools, movie theaters, and city streets. Ask yourself — how can you claim that you respect human life while choosing fealty to weapons-makers over support for measures favored by the vast majority of your constituents.

“My heart breaks for Sutherland Springs. Just like it still does for Las Vegas. And Orlando. And Charleston. And Aurora. And Blacksburg. And Newtown. Just like it does every night for Chicago. And New Orleans. And Baltimore. And Bridgeport. The terrifying fact is that no one is safe so long as Congress chooses to do absolutely nothing in the face of this epidemic. The time is now for Congress to shed its cowardly cover and do something.”

 

It’s Time to Come Home to Wesleyan!

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This weekend is Homecoming/Family Weekend, and we are expecting a great turnout from the Wes family. The activities get underway on Friday, November 3 with a fascinating array of WesSeminars throughout the day. These culminate in the evening at Wesleyan’s RJ Julia Bookstore on Main Street at 7 p.m. when Beverly Daniel Tatum ’75, P ’04, Hon. ’15, will be discussing the revised 20th anniversary edition of her landmark study,  WHY ARE ALL THE BLACK KIDS SITTING TOGETHER IN THE CAFETERIA? And Other Conversations About Race.

There are lots of events on Saturday as well, with topics ranging from the environment to journalism, from photography to immigration. The Dwight Greene lecture features Judge Denise Jefferson Casper ’90 in Memorial Chapel at 4 p.m. Wesleyan alumni created the feature film Patti Cake$, which screens at C-Film at 8 p.m.

We are hoping for  a record-breaking athletic/science event on Foss Hill from 10 am–noon:

The Wesleyan Mathematics and Science Scholars (WesMaSS) Program plans to break the Guinness world record for the largest number of people rolling down a hill within an hour.

Come join the fun and raise Cardinal spirit by having students, staff and the Middletown community work together to break a world record and get into the Guinness Book!

There’s also what promises to be a hotly contested football game against Williams at 1 p.m. GO WES!!