Beyond Vegan: Long Lane Farm to Raise Bison

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As many of you know, the Long Lane Farm has been very successful at selling organic vegetables to our food services vendor, Bon Appetit. This means we are eating local, and we are eating healthy! Furthermore, students are gaining valuable experience in managing a farm and understanding how a small operation can make a big difference. Well, that difference just got bigger!

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Next year, Wesleyan students will be raising bison right here in Middletown. We tried raising chickens on the farm a few years ago, and I know that we had unhappy results. So, after crowd sourcing an innovation agenda on sustainable edibles, we decided to scale up with animals that are less fragile. This will be meat that comes from local animals raised with care (and organic feed). The herd will benefit from the beautiful meadow just adjacent to the farm…cross country runners will now have something really interesting to gaze at!

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The idea comes to us from the bison farm at Amherst, Massachusetts, where hipsters know that locally curated meat is the answer to the Omnivore’s Dilemma.

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…but don’t worry about this being a Trojan bovine. Although we won’t try to breed red heifers, we will make sure that our bison love the cardinals. Imagine bringing one of the creatures out at half-time at Homecoming!

GO WES!!

Center for Prison Education Receives Major Grant!

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Wesleyan has received a $300,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to support our Center for Prison Education. This is an important infusion of support to a program that has made a powerful, positive difference in the lives of incarcerated people and the faculty and students on campus who work with them. As a recent Connection story emphasized, “the grant will not only help fund the classes taught at the Cheshire and York Correctional Institutions, but also support CPE’s re-entry services, which assist students who complete their sentences in continuing their college education post-release.”

The Connection story goes on to note that “CPE’s mission is informed by research that shows the rate of return to prison – recidivism – is reduced by education. Studies have found that participation in postsecondary education while incarcerated can reduce rates of recidivism by more than 40 percent. Further, CPE believes that an investment in individuals is also in the communities and families to which the prisoners belong.”

I remember well when Russell Perkins ’09 came to my office to discuss his ideas for teaching college classes at a nearby prison. I have to admit that I was skeptical that the program could be sustained, and whether our efforts would have the kind of impact that our students hoped it would. Over the years, I have been impressed by the seriousness and dedication of the staff and students who ensure that our classes meet real learning objectives, and by the faculty who pour heart, soul and intellect into their work with those who are incarcerated. Last year I lectured at the Cheshire prison about liberal education, and I had the clear sense that these were students eager to get the most out of our undergraduate classes.

Recently one of our Wesleyan students at Cheshire wrote powerfully about his experience of working in the program. You can read his essay here.

I am so grateful to the Ford Foundation for recognizing and supporting the great work of the CPE!

Interdisciplinary Social Science Opportunity

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The Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life has created a great opportunity for interdisciplinary study next year. Dean Joyce Jacobsen, in collaboration with Professors John Finn (Govt) and Richard Adelstein (Econ), has organized a cluster of courses on Centralization and Decentralization.

Here are some excerpts from the Allbritton website:

Two of the courses in the Cluster are sections of regular Wesleyan courses taught in the Fall semester, Professor Finn’s GOVT 203 and Professor Adelstein’s ECON 254, in each of which ten places will be reserved for Cluster students (section 2 of each course). Cluster students must take at least one of these courses, though they may take both if they are admitted to the other course through regular procedures. The third course, CSPL 320-321, is required of all Cluster students and will be a year-long, team-taught (Adelstein & Finn) research seminar on the themes of the Cluster, with one-half credit awarded each semester. Here, students will explore various approaches to the Cluster theme, hear relevant lectures from invited guests from within and without the academy, and split into small, coordinated groups to embark on sustained collaborative research projects that each focus on some aspect of the problem of centralizing or decentralizing economic and political life. The seminar will culminate in a public presentation of the work and a volume of collaborative essays on specific themes and topics that might be published by a scholarly press.

The organizers hope that students will use the perspectives gained in these two courses not only to look more deeply into how American economic and political life have been organized in the past, but to address urgent questions for the present from around the world. How should the US be governed in the next century? What is the future of the EU? What can be learned from the disappearance of the USSR or the unification of Germany? Should Scotland secede from the UK? How can artificially created, deeply divided countries everywhere be governed or restructured? Nor need all the questions be political. How do big firms differ from small ones, and why do some firms grow large while others stay small? What are the political or moral consequences of economic concentration? How can multinational firms be governed and regulated? What might an antitrust law do to concentrate or disperse power?

Professors Adelstein and Finn are hoping to attract students from all majors who are strongly interested in the Cluster’s theme and prepared to work steadily over the year to learn more about the complex and difficult questions the theme raises and present their learning in a substantial collaborative research project. Applications are welcome from students in all majors for a new program to begin in Fall 2014. They are due April 7. If you have any questions regarding this Collaborative Cluster Program, please contact either John Finn (jfinn@wesleyan.edu) or Richard Adelstein (radelstein@wesleyan.edu).

This is a great new opportunity for interdisciplinary work on a vital topic. More information at the website.

 

Review of Simon Schama’s “The Story of the Jews”

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This past weekend I reviewed Simon Schama’s The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BCE -1492 AD for the San Francisco Chronicle. When I lived in the Bay area I reviewed for this paper frequently, and I very much enjoyed reading Schama’s book, a companion volume to a Public Television series. Check your local times…

 

Simon Schama didn’t want “The Story of the Jews,” five hours of television and two big books, to be only “pogroms and rabbinics” – his history would draw on many sources: archaeology and hermeneutics, folktales and theology, esoteric texts detailing messianic beliefs and receipts for gifts offered to a neighbor.

Schama is a historian of prodigious and varied gifts. He can take a specific subject and drill deep; he can take a wide-angled view of many countries over long periods of time. He does both in this excellent first volume, which begins with the fifth century Before the Common Era in Egypt (yes, Jews were back in Egypt eight centuries after Moses was supposed to have led them out) and concludes with the “exile from exile” in Spain at the end of the 15th century of the Common Era.

Schama underscores that Jewish cultural identity was formed not just through the Promised Land but more broadly between the Nile and the Euphrates. Jerusalem was a touchstone for many, and the quest for the promised homeland is fundamental to the religion and culture.

But the dispersal of Jews is also fundamental – and not just because of the Roman destruction of the Holy City and the subsequent Diaspora. No, centuries before the Romans, “it was possible to be Jewish and Egyptian, just as later it would be possible to be Jewish and Dutch or Jewish and American.” Schama highlights the inclusive dimensions of the Jewish past, although he also emphasizes the ways that other groups sought to destroy this inclusivity.

“The bulk of the Bible … was written when the weaknesses of state power were most apparent. The portable scroll-book became the countervailing force to the sword.” When their neighbors turned on them, it was their texts to which Jews would cling to maintain their identity. Other monotheisms would invest heavily in their weapons, but for millennia “Jewish life was Jewish words, and they could and would endure beyond the vicissitudes of power, the loss of land, the subjection of people.”

This commitment to “finding the words” was not, as many have imagined, at the expense of images. After the Romans dispersed Jews far from Jerusalem, the people of the book were also a people of mosaics, of painting, of sculpture. In these creations they often borrowed heavily from the communities around them. Schama shows that early rabbinic Jewish culture was much more open than has generally been assumed.

This openness began to change, though not everywhere and not all at once, with the development of Christianity. Augustine may have counseled that Jews should be allowed to exist as a reminder of the Bible’s prophecies of Christ, but he was already battling a tradition from John that Jews were just “fit for killing.”

In the sixth century, after a period of toleration, the Roman Emperor Justinian announced that all synagogues should be converted to churches. After the empire was destroyed, murderous attacks on Jews frequently followed any local crisis. When a community experienced some trouble, it blamed the Jews.

Many Jews were scattered around Arabia when in the seventh century Muhammad’s teachings and armies began to be victorious. And although there was plenty of animosity between early Islam and Judaism, “in comparison with medieval Christian societies, Jews and Muslims “did indeed live with rather than just rub up against each other.”

Islamic leaders, like their Christian counterparts, often tolerated or depended on Jews – for trade, for loans, for cultural exchanges. Schama reminds us playfully that many elites seemed to think they needed a Jewish doctor in the house. And he beautifully describes the work of Jewish poets and scientists who borrowed from Islamic and Christian sources.

Especially powerful is his treatment of Maimonides, 12th century doctor, judge and philosopher, who argued against the idea that rational inquiry and strong faith had to be at odds. Maimonides’ “Guide to the Perplexed” incited sharp attacks from his co-religionists and from those who resented such a learned author daring to reject the savior.

While Schama provides plenty of examples of productive exchanges between Jew and non-Jew in a variety of contexts, the book’s final sections detail the rage that led good Christians in preparing for their Holy Crusades to slit the throats of Jewish children.

In 13th century England, mass hangings and burnings of Jews were followed by expulsion, and things were no better on the continent. Sometimes kings and nobles tried to protect Jewish subjects against popular fury, but all too often they proved willing to sacrifice them as scapegoats to satisfy fanatics.

The Spanish Inquisition institutionalized state cruelty, combining archaic savagery with modern methods of investigation and torture. Schama brings this volume to a close in 1492, when the Jews were exiled from Spain and (soon after) from Portugal.

In this revealing and moving book, though, Schama shows that exiling the Jews from our histories is not so simple. Fourteen ninety-two was also the year Columbus set sail in search of a new route to India. His royal patrons had expelled the Jews, but he took with him a Jewish translator and the navigation guide developed by Abraham Zacuto, a rabbi.

Around the same time, Vasco da Gama also set sail with Zacuto’s guide to celestial bodies: “Thanks to the rabbi, the great captain and founder of Portugal’s Asian empire knew, more or less, where he was.”

 

The Story of the Jews

Finding the Words, 1000 BC-1492 AD

By Simon Schama

(Ecco; 496 pages; $39.99)

Working for Peace and Democracy in the Middle East

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On Thursday, March 27 at 8:00 pm (PAC 002) J- St, a national group with a Wes affiliate working to go beyond entrenched dichotomies in the Middle East, is sponsoring an important program. Nizar Farsakh speaking about his experience growing up in the West Bank and how he came to believe in working with Israelis to end the occupation and to achieve a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  The lecture will be followed by a Q and A session.

Nizar Farsakh is Program Director for Civil Society Partnerships at POMED, the Project on Middle East Democracy. Before joining POMED, he was the General Director of the General Delegation of the PLO to the US for two years. Nizar has ten years of experience working in Palestine first as a research assistant in an NGO in Bethlehem and then as the Policy Advisor to Palestinian negotiators on border-related issues from 2003 to 2008. In his last year in Ramallah he was seconded to the Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. Nizar is also a leadership trainer focusing on public narrative, community organizing and adaptive leadership and is affiliated with the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

At a time of increasing international tension, it will be good to hear from someone who believes in the possibilities for substantial change through peaceful, intense political practice.

No Break for Thesis Writers

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Every March the campus empties out, and as the New England winter slowly gives way to spring, most students get a break before the mad dash to the end of term. But each year I am reminded of the seniors who remain behind, in the libraries or in science labs, in studios or just hiding in some quiet corner…writing, calculating, thinking, editing, and generally burning the midnight oil as they prepare senior projects.

I can’t help but think back to writing my own thesis on psychoanalysis and politics. This was one of my most important intellectual experiences, and the fact that I’m still teaching Freud in the spring (next week, in fact) points to the impact that focused research and writing can have. It may also point to my own lack of intellectual progress.

In any case… I put out a call on Twitter and also to the academic Deans to hear about the subjects on which seniors are working. This list is not representative…just a collection from those who sent me information. But look at the range of topics. Here’s what I’ve received:

Ariella Axelbank (advisor: John Finn), “The Lack of a National Theater in the United States”
Lucy Britt (Sonali Chakravarti), “Political Reconciliation and Forgiveness in Post-Genocide Rwanda”
Grace Powell (Doug Foyle), “US Drone Strikes in Pakistan and Yemen”
Chloe Rinehart (Jim McGuire), “Conditional Cash Transfers in Ecuador: Obstacles to Uptake”
Andrew Trexler (Joslyn Trager), “War Making and State Development in the Contemporary Middle East”
Jeremy Edelberg (Abigail Hornstein), “Corporate Bond Liquidity and Credit Spreads”
Mari Jarris (Ulrich Plass), “Theory, Empirics, Revolution: A Three-Dimensional Approach to Subverting Authority”
Bohao Zhou (Brian Fay), “Cosmopolitanism: A Pragmatic Attitude of Self-Growth”
Max Bigman (Jolee West, Joyce Jacobsen), “An Algorithm for Reform: The Potential Impact of Blended Learning on American Education”
Katie Deane (Studio Art),”In-Out, In-Out”
Joshua Neitzel (Francis Starr), “Stability of DNA-linked Nanoparticle Lattices”
Paul Hanakata (Francis Starr), “Unraveling the mysteries of the Polymer Thin-Film Glass Transition” (This thesis has already led to two publications!)
Peter Martin (Marty Gilmore), “Modeling and Analysis of Potential Martian Brines”
Lisle Winston (Scott Holmes), “Examining the role of histone variant H2A.Z in chromosome dynamics”
Matthew Donahue (Jill Morawski), “On Being Second Guessed by a Machine: A Reevaluation of the Bogus Pipeline”
Alec Harris (Elizabeth Willis) is writing a creative thesis that consists of poems about economics. He is an econ/English double major.
Anya Morgan (Rachel Ellis Neyra) is writing about zombies in American film and Haitian literature.
Emily Weitzman (Clifford Chase and Lisa Cohen) is writing a creative non-fiction piece about her experience with Sister Asya, a midwife, and other Muslim women in Kenya.
Aron Chilewich (Courtney Weiss Smith) is writing about the novels of Ben Lerner(not Marcus, as I had written), the much acclaimed author of contemporary experimental fiction.
Elizabeth Clayton (Kari Weil) is writing on the literary genealogy of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Taylor Steele (Amy Bloom) is writing about how food in its various states is connected to our experiences and desires.
Ethan Tischler (Mary-Jane Rubenstein),”Emptiness and Wholeness: Untangling the ‘Realities’ of Tibetan Buddhism and Quantum Physics”
Nathaniel Elmer (Architecture), “Beat Space”

In Romance Languages and Literatures I’ve head about the following:

Elle Markell is writing a thesis in Spanish about Argentinian writer César Aira.
Sarah Dash, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Fascist Ideology in the Kitchens of a Nation”

Christina Norris will produce a radio podcast in the format of “This American Life” to explore the public reception and consumption of the media portrayal of terrorism following the March 2012 terrorist attack in Toulouse, France, and the Boston Marathon tragedy a year later in April 2013.

Two more in NSB from Matt Kurtz:

Rachel Rosengard, “Comparing two methods for improving verbal memory in schizophrenia”

Rachel Olfson, “Methods for Remediation of Theory of Mind (ToM) Deficits in Schizophrenia”

Sarah Mahurin reports that Elsa Hardy (AfAm, Hispanic Studies) is writing a thesis on cross-cultural exchange between child care providers and their employers.

Sarah Sculnick (English) is writing on the urban literary regionalisms of Gwendolyn Brooks (Chicago) and August Wilson (Pittsburgh).

In General Scholarship:

Maggie Feldman-Piltch, “Enforcing the Human Rights Obligations of Organizations”

And from FGSS, certainly a contender for best title:

Ella Dawson (Robert Steele), “Girl Has Sex, World Doesn’t End: Reconceptualizing Feminist Erotica”

That’s already an impressive list, but there are lots more theses being written, drawn, and performed. I apologize for not having a more complete list, but if you are so inclined…just add titles to to comments below.

Major Mellon Grant Supports New College of Film

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Last week I received great news from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. The board just approved a major endowment grant to our new College of Film and the Moving Image. CFMI will receive a $2 million gift, if Wesleyan can raise another $4 million for the College over the next four years. This is similar to the very generous matching gift that Mellon made to our Center for the Humanities a couple of years ago. We completed that match in 2013, establishing an endowment for the Center for the Humanities for the first time in its 50-year history.

The CFMI is dedicated to advancing understandings of the moving image in all its forms—film, television, and digital media—through pedagogy, scholarship, community outreach, and historical preservation. The focus throughout is on the study and practice of visual storytelling, and the model of a close-knit, interactive college is well suited to the inherently collaborative nature of work in the world of film, television, and digital media. The CFMI—integrating our renowned Department of Film Studies, Cinema Archives, Center for Film Studies, and Film Series—will expand student access to the subject and increase learning opportunities for non-film majors.

I believe that this is the first major grant that Mellon has made to film studies in its long history of supporting liberal education. The foundation explained that Wesleyan’s liberal arts approach to film was “unique” in the field, and its leadership was delighted to help the university build a foundation for a program that had already achieved so much.

Congratulations to the film alumni, students and faculty! And now onward to raise this important endowment match!!

Stamping Out Sexual Violence

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This week we learned that a survivor of a sexual assault had filed a lawsuit against the Psi Upsilon fraternity at Wesleyan, some of its individual members and its national organization. We had not spoken publicly about this matter out of concern for the survivor’s privacy. Now that civil proceedings have commenced, on behalf of the university community, I want to express our horror at this shameful assault. Our internal investigation of the incident, which took place last spring at an event held in violation of university regulations, led to the perpetrator’s dismissal from the university and sanctions against the fraternity and individual members of it.

At Wesleyan there are three residential fraternities. Their buildings, housing a total of 67 students, are owned by their respective organizations. While these fraternities have had some autonomy, all have seen increased scrutiny over the past few years.  In the short term, we have focused our attention on improving the safety of these spaces for all students who use them. On a more general level, we created a Title IX Task Force led by the Board of Trustees in coordination with our Vice-President for Equity and Inclusion, which is working to ensure gender equity throughout the Wesleyan educational experience. In addition, over the next several months we will be gathering information to present to the Board as it considers what role, if any, residential fraternities will have on our campus in the future.

Sexual assaults on college campuses are not, of course, only a fraternity issue. Over several years, Wesleyan has worked to reduce the incidence of assaults on campus, support those who have been assaulted, dismiss those who have been found guilty, and to generally raise awareness about these issues. As I have noted, although at Wesleyan there are usually only a handful of reports of sexual violence each year, each one is extremely painful and leaves a scar on the individual and on the community. Furthermore, we know how under-reported these crimes are across the country in general and on college campuses in particular. Michael Whaley, the vice president for student affairs, issues an annual report on “Wesleyan’s Response to Sexual Violence,” and additional information is available on the university’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response website. Resources and programs dedicated to this problem include:

  • Wesleyan’s Sexual Assault Resource Coordinator is a full-time member of the university’s Counseling and Psychological Services staff and serves as the point person for coordinating support for survivors of sexual assault. She works closely with the Sexual Assault Response Team – a group of trained staff and faculty who provide support for survivors.
  • We Speak, We Stand, Wesleyan’s Community of Care program, provides bystander intervention training to empower bystanders to intervene in situations involving such issues as high-risk alcohol use and sexual violence. Sexual violence is a complex and multi-faceted societal issue, and therefore requires the attention of all campus constituents.
  • “We Speak, We Stand” also leads mandatory sessions on sexual violence at new student orientation. Subsequently, new students convene for small residentially based discussions about sexual assault and alcohol use.
  • Wesleyan annually makes its policies regarding sexual violence clear to all students, faculty, and staff through communications from the Dean of Students and the Vice President for Student Affairs.
  • The Sexual Assault Resource Coordinator and Director of WesWELL have worked with student groups on a healthy relationship workshop series, a consent campaign, a “Red Flag” campaign to address dating violence, and several support group for survivors of sexual assault.
  • Wesleyan continues to work with student organizations, including fraternities, on the safety of their programs for all students.
  • The university annually evaluates its own efforts to assess efficacy and ensure that everything possible is being done to provide a safe environment for everyone on campus. We want all members of our community to be confident in the care we take in dealing with any reports and in the fairness of our procedures.

Sexual assault at colleges and universities is a national problem, and it is important to raise awareness about these heinous crimes. On our campus, we have had our consciousness raised concerning this issue, but each incident is still agonizing – traumatic for survivors and painful for the whole community. As president of alma mater and as a parent, nothing disturbs me more than these attacks. My heart aches for those who have been victimized, and I work to ensure that we do everything we can to support them.

The great majority of Wesleyans are united in wanting to create a campus unencumbered by sexual violence. In concert with our community, I am determined to explore all avenues for changing our culture to stamp out sexual assault. I will work together with all university constituencies to continue to improve our ability to care for survivors, vigorously pursue perpetrators, and create a positive campus climate in which sexual violence has no place.

Shasha Seminar on the Novel

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The novel has been at the core of lifelong learning for generations of students, and so I am delighted that this year’s Shasha Seminar will focus on the genre. Amy Bloom, who directs the Shapiro Creative Writing Center, is leading the event, which will take place on campus April 5-6. “The Novel is not only the form of fiction I love and know best,” she writes, “but also a form that is still enormously popular and evolving with readers, whether they are e-readers, fans of the turning page or creators and readers of novels that emerge Tweet by Tweet.  This will be a star-studded feast for readers and writers, a combination of pleasure, intellectual stimulation, with provocative questions, sublime readings and some unexpected answers.” Amy’s remarkable new novel, Lucky Us, is coming out this summer, and she has gathered together a most impressive group of authors to participate in the program.

A recent Philip Roth (no relation) interview in The New York Times underscored some crucial aspects of the genre. I particularly liked this: “The thought of the novel is embodied in the moral focus of the novel. The tool with which the novelist thinks is the scrupulosity of his style. Here, in all this, lies whatever magnitude his thought may have.”

In my Modern and Post-Modern course, students will soon have the pleasure of reading Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, and in the same class they’ve already read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. These novels are among a dozen or so I’ve taught over the years in my intellectual history classes, and the political, moral and aesthetic dimensions of the works have been key to my thinking about a wide range of issues. The Shasha Seminar will provide plenty to consider in relation to fantasy, history, politics, identity, desire and aesthetics…. It surely will be a feast for readers and writers!

The Shasha Seminar on The Novel begins Saturday, April 5, 2014 with a reception lunch.  Some sessions are open and free for students, and you can find out more about the event here.

 

Wes Photography Collection: See it Now!

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Did you know that Wesleyan has a marvelous photography collection to complement its first-rate collection of prints? From time to time I teach a seminar on Photography and Philosophy, and my students and I have the delightful opportunity to work with pictures in the Davison Art Center.

You still have a chance to get a glimpse into these treasures. Planes, Trains and Automobiles, an exhibition at Davison, is open through Thursday, March 6. The show is a gem, with images from famous artists alongside pictures that will knock your socks off by photographers you may never have heard of.

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If you are interested in photography, check out this exhibition, and keep your eyes peeled for future shows at Davison.