Near the end of the fall semester, I’ve usually presented a fairly brief update on what we’ve done over the last year with respect to our framework for planning, Wesleyan 2020.  This year we are working on an addendum to this framework that will take us out much further than four years from now. We’ve called this Beyond 2020: Strategies for Wesleyan, and over the course of this academic year I am discussing its core ideas with all campus constituencies. In conjunction with this look forward, we have prepared an assessment of our work on the objectives we set out in 2010. There’s quite a bit here, and my thanks go to staff around the campus who collected the information. You can find a PDF of this document HERE.

Over the years we’ve accomplished a great deal together, and yet there is still so much more we can do to realize Wesleyan’s full potential. I remain convinced that the overarching goals in Wesleyan 2020 are useful for framing the work we will do together. Together we energize Wesleyan’s distinctive educational experience; together we enhance recognition of Wesleyan as an extraordinary institution; together we work within a sustainable economic model while retaining core values.  

Fall semester is coming to a close, the next approaches, and in the meantime, the holidays. I wish you satisfaction in accomplishment, excitement about the future, and joy in your holiday celebrations. 

Today we’re announcing an all-star list of Wesleyan alumni to serve as judges for the new Wesleyan University Hamilton Prize for Creativity. Their accomplishments are a testament to Wesleyan’s outsized role as an incubator of some of today’s most boundary-breaking thinkers, artists and writers. I’m so pleased that these extraordinary contributors to our society and culture have generously agreed to volunteer their time to select our first Hamilton Prize recipient, who will be named later in the spring.

The committee’s honorary chairs are Thomas Kail ’99 and Lin-Manuel Miranda ’02, Hon. ’15, and the prize is named in their honor for their now famous achievement in creating the cultural phenomenon Hamilton: An American Musical. The prize will be awarded to an incoming student who has submitted a creative written work judged to best reflect the originality, artistry and dynamism embodied in Hamilton.

I look forward with great enthusiasm to finding out which incoming Wesleyan student will be chosen by the committee to receive this exceptional honor, which includes a four-year full-tuition scholarship.

The deadline for submissions for the Hamilton Prize and to apply to Wesleyan is January 1, 2017. You can read more about the Hamilton Prize and the committee here.

Shapiro Distinguished Professor of Writing and Theater Quiara Alegria Hudes was recently asked by American Theater for some brief post-election reflections on “what theater can do.” She kindly gave me permission to share her brief essay here as a guest blog.

Panoramic time

My grandmother’s was a food=love home. The meals were modest, sometimes limited in quantity if the grocery budget was tight, but even the way Abuela placed the tin plate on the table revealed a practiced and virtuosic love. Hers was a humility bursting with enterprise: in times of scarcity there ought always be small bowl of food offer to a neighbor.

The danger of food=love came when the meals went beyond nourishment to something more voracious—consumption for consumption’s sake. Abuela left her farm in Puerto Rico in the 50s, trading a familiar agrarian poverty for an unkind Philadelphia poverty. What a wager she took coming here, what a bold move it was.

By the time of my adolescence, her risky bet started to show returns. While some of her progeny remained mired in poverty, my mom bought a new red Volvo with leather seats. We drove to the local sushi restaurant and ordered sashimi a la carte. By my twenties, friends were charging foie-stuffed kobe burgers to corporate law accounts. Abundance had tipped into vampirism.

Reflecting on this election cycle, I wonder if information=truth is the internet-age version of food=love. It is imperative, of course, that we search for, scrutinize, articulate, and share what information we can gather—it is democratic.

But in the months leading up to November 8, my information=truth gauge got off-kilter. I became a sucker for every bit of click-bait, eschewing information for binge-consumed spin. If there were articles engaging substantively with each candidate’s platform, I didn’t find my way to them. Instead I consumed (miserably, growing more sick with each click) mud-slinging op-eds, grotesque tweets, debate spectacles.

The morning after, I felt disgusted, like an addict who looks in the mirror after the binge. I was the fool complicit in my own duping—I had gone right along with the scam. The scam goes something like this: the more lavish the plate of food, the better the meal. The more media consumed per hour, the vaster one’s knowledge.

On November 9, I turned off the news. Even trusted sites, like the New York Times, had to go dark—because it wasn’t just “fake news” that had duped me, it was “real news,” too. I returned to my dog-eared James Baldwin, flashlight in hand, as the kids slept. I underlined new passages, wrote fresh margin notes atop fading ones. My mind made space for a thing called quiet. My habits returned to what Danielle Allen calls “slow reading.”

Fellow artists, let’s reject the rhetoric and infrastructure of “consumer content.” Let’s renounce the toxic suck of the five-minute news cycle. Ours must be a practice of panoramic time. For, we are a past we did not choose but inherited, and we architect the future with each new page we write.

Let us nourish each other.

Giving Tuesday was a great success here at Wesleyan with over 3,674 gifts received. This triggered the generous $300,000 donation to financial aid from the Frank-Kim family, and all the gifts will go to supporting programs of interest to students across the University.

It was a big day for philanthropy around the world, and I am so grateful that the Wesleyan family responded with such verve and munificence (can’t you tell I’m teaching a class on virtue)!

After the Black Friday and Cyber Monday advertisements have inundated us with calls to shop, shop, shop, let’s preserve some room in our heads to heed the plea of #GivingTuesday: give, give, give. Wesleyan is again participating in this global philanthropic movement, with the encouragement of  a matching gift from the Frank-Kim Family. When 3,000 members of our Cardinal community give to Wesleyan for any purpose on or before Giving Tuesday, November 29, 2016, the Frank-Kim family will donate $300,000 for financial aid. You can find out how to make your gift here.

And while we’re in a generous mood, let’s remember our wonderful community radio station: WESU FM. I just received a request for donations from the current vice president of WESU, Ben Goldberg:

Thanks to everyone who has responded to our calls to action–we’ve made quite some progress with our current fall pledge drive. We have less than $7k to go, and we need your support to push us through to the end of this campaign. We can’t keep the station running without you, so know that your donation really does make a difference.

 If you haven’t donated yet, now is the time. Community radio and alternative organizing are crucial right now, as they have always been. WESU is a truly special place, providing a platform for marginalized voices to be heard across the world. It is a place for hope, resistance, and change.

Through our incredible host of public affairs programs and music shows, WESU empowers people of color, indigenous populations, women, and queer folks to spread their own stories and messages that are often ignored in the mainstream media. Homegrown shows like Your English is Good as well our Italian programs serve communities that still use English as a second language. Syndicated programming like Pacifica’s Rising Up with Sonali and Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman have been providing powerful coverage on Standing Rock, The Climate Action Summit, police shootings and activism around the world. These are just a few examples of the important work WESU does to serve so many different communities.

 Radio can be an incredibly powerful tool for both DJs and listeners alike, as I’m hoping you all have had the opportunity to experience. If you haven’t yet felt the power of community radio, keep listening–you’ll find it. Community radio matters. Independent media matters. WESU matters. Donate today! www.wesufm.org/pledge

We have much to be thankful for at Wesleyan, and many ways to contribute to organizations we care about. Let’s show that support between now at Tuesday, November 29th!

Across the country, many are calling for their universities to become sanctuary campuses. The model is the “sanctuary city,” like Austin, New York City, Chicago and dozens of other municipalities, which have declared their intention not to cooperate with federal officials seeking to deport residents simply because they lack appropriate immigration documentation.

Having spoken with students, faculty and staff over the last week, and having conferred with the Board of Trustees, I think it very important to declare that Wesleyan University is a sanctuary campus. For us, this means the following:

• Wesleyan will remain committed to the principles of non-discrimination, including equal protection under the law, regardless of national origin or citizenship.

• Wesleyan will not voluntarily assist in any efforts by the federal government to deport our students, faculty or staff solely because of their citizenship status.

As we say in our webpages, we will continue to “welcome all undergraduate applicants regardless of citizenship status.  Undocumented students, with or without Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), who apply to Wesleyan will continue to be treated identically to any other U.S. citizen or permanent resident in their high school.”

Through our alumni networks, we are also putting together legal resources for members of the Wesleyan community with questions concerning their immigration status. We will facilitate connections to these resources and other support services, as we work with appropriate offices and constituency groups on campus.

These are small steps, to be sure, in the face of a very frightening wave of threats to roll back the civil rights gains made in recent decades. But we will stand up and take these steps; we will do our best to protect our community, and we will gather resources to enable all its members, regardless of citizenship status, to continue to have opportunities to thrive here.

For several years now, Wesleyan students, faculty and staff have been working with incarcerated people in Connecticut state prisons. With all the post-election tumult, it is important to remember that there has been an emerging consensus from various parts of the political spectrum to end mass incarceration. Now there is political work to be done to ensure that “law and order” rhetoric not evolve into policies that continue to decimate communities of color while benefiting private prison companies. And there is educational work to be done. Wesleyan’s Center for Prison Education is bringing resources to incarcerated men and women who learn together with their teachers and mentors.

Recently the Ford Foundation awarded Wesleyan’s Center for Prison Education a $300,000 grant to continue its important work. The people at Ford recognized the dedication of the students who founded the program, along with the talents and energy of the teachers and supporting staff who bring a first-rate liberal education to men and women behind bars. This grant will allow us to continue to offer classes, and, in cooperation with Middlesex Community College, offer an Associate’s Degree.

Earlier this semester, I attended part of the Shasha Seminar, which this year was focused on problems of mass incarceration. I heard very moving accounts of working to get prisoners released and of the problems that folks face after they thought they were leaving a life behind bars. I talked with Wesleyan alumni who have been doing this important work for many years, and who now see possibilities for real change. But the most powerful talks I heard were from people who had committed serious crimes and then, through education, turned their lives around. Education, they explained, saved their lives, and now they felt a duty to help others who were struggling.

Isn’t this one of the great effects of liberal education? Experiencing the awakening of one’s own potential through learning, one wants to participate in the education of others. It’s a form of liberation, a way out of the mindset of incarceration.

I am grateful to the Ford Foundation for supporting our work at the Center for Prison Education. The dedication of the folks doing this work is especially admirable in these tumultuous times.

In my message to the campus on Saturday, I underscored that  “Wesleyan will never retreat from our mission of creating an inclusive and equitable community. We are open to debate, to challenging ideas, but we will never back down in the face of crude bigotry.” Threats of mass deportation is one of the forms that crude bigotry has recently been taking, and this threat is totally at odds with our decision last year to treat undocumented applicants just like other applicants from the United States.

This weekend I have been asked by students and faculty about Wesleyan becoming a sanctuary campus, which means (at the very least) that we would not cooperate with any efforts at mass deportations. I find this a very promising direction, having said that “we will find ways to cultivate the values that sustain our educational community and protect the people who have made it their home.” In the coming days and weeks I will discuss this option with the appropriate offices and Trustees. I will report back to the campus on what we can do in this regard.

Inside Higher Education asked me for further thoughts in the aftermath of the election:

Like many university people, I kept underestimating the phenomenon of Donald Trump. Months ago, I called attention to “The Trumpian Calamity,” hoping that more college presidents and other education leaders would condemn his campaign of hate-filled demagoguery. Now, like so many around the country, I find myself wondering whether I should have done more.

My essay, parts of which come from earlier communications I’ve made to the campus, is here.

This morning I sent the following message to the Wesleyan community:

Dear friends,

In the past few days a few Wesleyan students have received racist, threatening messages. This is completely unacceptable, and the University will fully support anyone targeted by hateful messages of this kind. We will also deploy our resources, including appropriate law enforcement agencies, to discover who was responsible for sending any threatening messages. There will be accountability.

The public sphere in this country has been for months polluted with an outpouring of racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic rhetoric. The pain of targeted groups is real because the threats are real, and we must acknowledge those threats and work to stop them from infecting our lives and our campus. We must fight to protect people of color and religious minorities from violence driven by socially sanctioned scapegoating and bullying. We must ensure that our friends in LGBTQ communities are not marginalized by newly empowered narrow-mindedness taking control of our legal system. And we must ensure that our campus is free from threats emerging from vile ideologies and hate-filled hearts.

Wesleyan will never retreat from our mission of creating an inclusive and equitable community. We are open to debate, to challenging ideas, but we will never back down in the face of crude bigotry.

If you know of people who have been targeted, please support them and urge them to report online HERE.

This is a challenging time in our country and on our campus. By looking out for one another, taking care of one another, we will find ways to cultivate the values that sustain our educational community and protect the people who have made it their home.

Sincerely yours,

Michael Roth

President