community

Welcome 2016!

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Kari and I are eagerly awaiting the convoy of cars and trucks about to pull into Middletown with members of the class of 2016. It’s a beautiful morning, and first-year students will see the campus looking its best as they meet their new roommates, find out how to get their food at Usdan, discover the newly renovated Butterfield dorms and the newly named Bennet Hall. Parents will be wondering (sometimes, with misty eyes) how quickly the time has passed since the first day of high school,  while their sons and daughters will often be wondering why their folks are lingering on the campus that now belongs to them. Not to worry: Homecoming/Family Weekend will be here before you know it!

International Students have had a couple of days head start, and it has been a treat to meet the families who have traveled to Middletown from all over the world. Athletes have also been on campus for a few days already. Last night Kari and I met an impressive group of volleyball players who will be working out at 7 am so they can be ready to help new students to move in later this morning.

I’ve also been talking with many faculty members gearing up for the new semester. Yesterday I met with more than twenty professors to discuss innovations in some of our larger classes. I picked up several pointers that I’ll use in my own course, The Modern and the Post-Modern, that starts Monday. I’ve been tinkering with the syllabus, wondering how students will react to the books I’ve chosen. We’ll soon find out!

Welcome to Wesleyan!

 

Arrival Day 2012, photo courtesy of Heather Brooke

 

Arrival Day 2012, photo courtesy of Olivia Drake
Arrival Day 2012, photo courtesy of Olivia Drake
Arrival Day 2012, photo courtesy of Olivia Drake

Two Guggenheims and Now a Pulitzer!

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In my previous post I congratulated Professors Elizabeth Willis and Magda Teter on their recent awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Today I learned that Visiting Theater Professor Quiara Alegría Hudes was just awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her play “Water by the Spoonful.” Professor Hudes (who also wrote the book for the Wes originated musical “In the Heights”) is here this semester teaching advanced writing for theater with Claudia Nascimento, and we hope she will be returning next year. CONGRATULATIONS!

I should add accolades to those already received by Noah Korman ’14, Greg Faxon ’14, Adam Keller ’14, Mark Nakhla ’13 and Sam Choi ’12 for their ASL music video of No Church in the Wild. Greg wrote to me to sing the praises of our sign language professor, Sheila Mullen. I’m sure she’s very proud!

Wes Students Sign “No Church in the Wild”

[youtube width=”640″ height=”360″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBi_18OGF6A[/youtube]

How to Choose Your (Our) University

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It’s that time of year again: the time when high school seniors previously anxious about whether they would get into the college of their dreams, now get to worry about choosing the college that is just right for them. In the last few weeks applicants have found out where they’ve been accepted, and now they are trying to envision where they will be most likely to thrive. Where will I learn the most, be happiest, find friends that will last a lifetime? How to choose? I thought it might be useful to re-post my thoughts on this, with a few revisions.

For many high school seniors, the month of April is decision time. Of course, for many the decision will be made on an economic basis. Which school has given the most generous financial aid package? Wesleyan is one of a small number of schools that meets the full financial need of all admitted students according to a formula developed over several years. There are some schools with larger endowments that can afford to be even more generous than Wes, but there are hundreds (thousands?) of others that are unable even to consider meeting financial need over four years of study.

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

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

Knowing that these schools all provide a high quality, broad and flexible curriculum with strong teaching, and that the students all have displayed great academic capacity, prospective students are trying to discern the personalities of each school. They are trying to imagine themselves on the campus, among the people they see, to get a feel for the chemistry of the place — to gauge whether they will be happy there. Hundreds of visitors will be coming to Wesleyan next week for WesFest (our annual program for admitted students). They will go to classes and athletic contests, musical performances and parties. And they will ask themselves: Would I be happy at Wesleyan?

I hope our visitors get a sense of the personality of the school that I so admire and enjoy. I hope they feel the exuberance and ambition of our students, the intelligence and care of our faculty, the playful yet demanding qualities of our community. I hope our visitors can sense our commitment to creating a diversity in which difference is embraced and not just tolerated, and to public service that is part of one’s education and approach to life.

We all know that Wesleyan is hard to get into (even more difficult this year!). But even in the group of highly selective schools, Wes is not for everybody. We aspire to be a community committed to boldness as well as to rigor, to idealism as well as to effectiveness. Whether in the sciences, arts, humanities or social sciences, our faculty and students are dedicated to explorations that invite originality as well as collaboration. The scholar-teacher model is at the heart of our curriculum. Our faculty are committed to teaching and to shaping the fields in which they work. Earlier this week, Henry Abelove gave a stirring lecture at the Center for Humanities call “What I Taught and How I Taught It.” I was Henry’s student in the mid 1970s, and members of his first-year seminar from a few years ago were also in the audience. His care for students and his dedication to the material being taught were everywhere in evidence. How proud and grateful I am to have been his student and colleague!

The commitment of our faculty says a lot about who we are, as does the camaraderie around the completion of senior theses this week. We know how to work hard, but we also know how to enjoy the work we choose to do. That’s been magically appealing to me for more than 30 years. I bet the magic will enchant many of our visitors, too.

Why We Value Diversity

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This week the Supreme Court voted to hear a challenge to the ability of colleges and universities to shape the racial and ethnic demographics of their student bodies. Currently, schools are allowed to use race as a factor among many others in achieving diversity for educational reasons. When the Court hears Fisher vs. the University of Texas, we may find that the justices set strict limits on how universities can consider race in their efforts to create an educational environment in which all students learn — and learn from one another.

Here at Wesleyan, we have for many years emphasized creating a diverse student body because we believe this results in a deeper educational experience. In the late 1960s President Victor Butterfield led the school away from cultivated homogeneity and toward creating a campus community in which people can learn from their differences while forming new modes of commonality. This had nothing to do with what would later be called political correctness or even identity politics. It had to do with preparing students to become lifelong learners who could navigate in and contribute to a heterogeneous world after graduation.

In our classrooms, students and teachers see the value of diversity throughout the semester. As David Kelley of IDEO and the Stanford Design School has noted time and time again, homogeneity kills creativity. The key to successful brainstorming and innovative teamwork is to have a multiplicity of perspectives. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman makes a similar point in his recent Thinking, Fast and Slow. Groups are beneficial for problem solving as long as they don’t degrade into following-the-leader; learning takes place when people bring a variety of perspectives to the issue at hand. If almost everyone is from the same background, you run the risk of substituting mere repetition for iterative cross-pollination.

At residential universities, homogeneity in the student body undermines our mission of helping students develop personal autonomy within a dynamic community. That’s why we are eager to welcome students from various parts of the United States and the rest of the world to our campuses. That’s why we ask our donors to support robust financial aid programs so as to ensure that our students come from a variety of economic backgrounds. A “dynamic community” is one in which members have to navigate difference — and racial and ethnic differences are certainly parts of the mix. All the students we admit have intellectual capacity, but we also want them to have different sorts of capacities. Their interests, modes of learning, and perspectives on the world should be sufficiently different from one another so as to promote active learning in and outside the classroom.

At Wesleyan our mission statement reminds us that we aim to prepare students “to explore the world with a variety of tools.” Diversity is an aspect of the world we expect our students to explore, turning it into an asset they can use. We expect graduates to have completed a course of study in the liberal arts that will enable them to see differences among people as a powerful tool for solving problems and seeking opportunities. We expect graduates to embrace diversity as a source of lifelong learning, personal fulfillment, and creative possibility. Selective universities want to shape a student body that maximizes each undergraduate’s ability to go beyond his or her comfort zone to draw on resources from the most familiar and the most unexpected places.

As the Supreme Court considers Fisher vs. the University of Texas, it is crucial that the justices continue to allow universities to consider race and ethnicity within a holistic admissions process that aims to create a student body that maximizes learning. University admissions programs are not the place to promote partisan visions of social justice, but they are the place to produce the most dynamic and profound learning environments. It would be an enormous step backward to force our admissions offices to retreat to a homogeneity that stifles creative, broad-based education.

cross-posted with Huffingtonpost

Deb Olin Unferth Nominated for National Book Critics Circle Award

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Deb Olin Unferth, Assistant Professor of English, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War. Deb’s book recounts how as a teenager in 1987 she and her boyfriend headed to El Salvador and Nicaragua to join the revolutionary forces fighting against military and paramilitary groups. Deb has also written a novel, Vacation, and a collection of short stories, Minor Robberies. She publishes lots of “short shorts” and has been working on a graphic novel. Deb teaches creative writing and contemporary literature at Wes.

Congratulations, Deb!

MLK Day: Now is the Time

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The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.”

Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for the law.
— Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963

If the cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. . . . Because the goal of America is freedom, abused and scorned tho’ we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny.
— Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. –Strength to Love, 1963

We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy, and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.” Letter From Birmingham Jail, 1963

 

Year-End Thanks

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Looking back on the year, I feel so grateful for the combination of caring and ambition, cooperation and intensity that marks our Wesleyan community. I think of the wonderful welcome our athletes gave the new students on move-in day, and of the stellar seasons that our men’s and women’s soccer teams had this fall. I think of the powerful theatrical experiences on campus – from the joy of musicals to the awe of classic dramas re-imagined by our students and faculty. Perusing the virtual faculty bookshelf, I admire the scholarly achievements of our professors, from studies of Frank Lloyd Wright to genealogies of racism, especially since I know well the contributions our scholar-teachers have made to the intellectual development of their students. And every day I am grateful for the contributions of the Wesleyan staff, who make all these achievements possible. The hard work of our staff, from reading admission files to planning graduation events, is the foundation of so much of what we are able to accomplish.

The Board of Trustees continues to guide the institution with affection, intelligence and generosity. Trustees, faculty, alumni, students and staff are dedicated to ensuring that our university remains at the forefront of forward-thinking liberal arts education. I am grateful for being part of this team.

I wish you all a restful break, a joyful holiday and a very happy new year.

Finding Those Times to Feel Thankful

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“The last few weeks have been especially hectic,” I told my older son recently, when we had our regular phone conversation to bridge the distance between West Coast and East.  “Do I say that every week,” I wondered. He, too, is increasingly busy, as are so many of the people around us. When do we take the time to stop and think? During this period of economic frustration and limited political horizons, when do we allow ourselves to feel gratitude for what we do have? For example, I am so grateful for those conversations with my son, and for knowing that he is having similar conversations with my mother. I am so grateful for my family.

Sometimes feelings of gratitude are bound up with feelings of vulnerability. When we realize how fragile life can be, we can be more open to experience that spirit of thankfulness. This season my family has faced some health challenges, and as we’ve gotten through them, I realize more than ever how lucky I am to have a caring, resourceful and loving family.

Sometimes feelings of gratitude are bound up with feelings of accomplishment. As we work hard on things that matter to us, we can be more open to experience a sense of gratitude and belonging. I work side by side with a very talented team, and I work on a campus infused with the energy of faculty, staff and students. I recognize how fortunate I am to work among people who aim to make a positive difference in the world.

Sometimes feelings of gratitude are bound up with feelings of hopefulness. When we realize how lucky we are to have family and friends who care for us, when we recognize how fortunate we are to be able to accomplish significant goals through cooperative work, we can be more open to feelings of hope for a meaningful future.

As we find the times to be thankful (especially in these tough periods), may our gratitude for present blessings be bound up with a sense of caring purpose.

Coming Home, Finding Family

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The extended Wes family has gathered together this weekend, celebrating scholarship, athletics, teaching and all things Red and Black. The seminars were often full and always lively, and they brought together the great energy that characterizes the classes here. I ran into Orin Snyder  ’83, who had just come from a packed discussion, led by the Wesleyan Lawyers Association, of the changing legal network for social media. And Alberto Ibarguen ’66 P’97 HON’11 was equally enthused about his session celebrating 50 years of the Peace Corps. The history of the Peace Corps at Wesleyan spills naturally into our new PATRICELLI CENTER FOR SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP. We cut the ribbon on the new Center on Saturday morning. Later in the day on Saturday I ran into some starry-eyed parents who were quite in awe of the presentation by Wes film faculty Jeanine Basinger, Scott Higgins and Steve Collins on “what makes movies great”! Jeanine was quoted extensively in this morning’s New York Times on Leonardo diCaprio (and a few days ago could be found in the Wall Street Journal). Our film folks are everywhere, but there’s nothing like seeing them on the home turf!

This weekend saw a grand celebration of the extraordinary work in experimental music by Alvin Lucier. Lucierfest brought out artists, musicians and writers who have been inspired by this pioneering composer and teacher. And speaking of things musical, I was delighted to catch Randy Newman’s benefit performance in the chapel on Friday night. We veered from ironic complicity to emotional commitment as he sampled his catalogue.

The efforts of our student athletes were so impressive this weekend, even if they left us saying, “wait ’til next year!” The cross country teams had very strong showings: the women were 6th of 40 teams  and the men were 9th of 44 teams. The women’s soccer team played well but fell to Amherst in the semi-finals of the NESCAC tournament. Our great goalie Jess Tollman ’15 kept the Lord Jeffs at bay for the first half, a fitting end to her strong first year. Our star forward Laura Kurash ’13 was named District Academic All American. This was our first time advancing this far in the tournament, and we are very proud of the women who battled all semester.

And speaking of a battle…our football team put up a mighty effort against the Purple Ephs in front of an enthusiastic homecoming crowd. We came very close to pulling off a great upset against Williams, thanks to a strong team effort. Matt Coyne passed for 192 yards, and star freshman running back LaDarius Drew ’15 was a workhorse despite the cast on his injured hand. Seniors Brett Bandazian and Jordan Greene had 10 tackles apiece, and our punter Jesse Warren ’15 had a world-class game. Coach Mike Whalen ’83 and the entire team are working together to build a great program. We are very proud of them!

All our athletes today are inspired by the great achievements of Wes students in the past. On Saturday night we inducted an all-star group into the Wesleyan Athletics Hall of Fame. When Moira James ’78, along with Dennis Robinson ’79 and the Athletics Advisory Council, came up with the idea of the hall of fame, I knew it would be a way of recognizing and reconnecting with our alumni greats. They also probably figured it would inspire contemporary success. And they were right!

I wish I were able to attend all the events, and it’s been a joy to welcome so many back to campus after a challenging week. Go Wes!

 

Late Afternoon A Cappella
Late Afternoon A Cappella

UPDATE: What a great thing to hear the many a cappella groups at the First Annual Stone A Capella Concert, celebrating Chip Stone ’49, p’79, P’82, GP ’11, GP ’15. A highlight for us was Chip and daughter Sarah Stone Maynard ’79 P ’11 singing a duet about the dangers of drugs to start things off.

 

Power Update: Classes Resuming…Homecoming/Family Weekend on the Horizon

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11/2/11 6:30 PM

Dear Friends,

Life at Wesleyan is returning to normal, but the aftermath of the storm is still very much with us, including lack of power and heat for a significant number of students on campus – and for many faculty and staff in the region. Connecticut Light and Power states on its website that power will be restored to all of Middletown by the end of the day Sunday; we’ve been told that power along Church and High streets may be restored as early as tomorrow.

I’d like to reiterate what I said yesterday evening: We are making alternative sleeping quarters available for these students who need them. Those who want to bunk with friends in the residence halls are encouraged to do so. Those who would like the university to find them a place to sleep until power is restored should contact Residential Life at: 860 685-3550. We will use common spaces and lounges in our residence halls and will open other venues as needed.

The Science Library will be open 24 hours today and tomorrow for students, faculty, and staff needing a warm place to work. The Freeman Athletic Center now offers the Wes community the possibility of really getting warm by getting some exercise. After some initial difficulties with the water heaters, I think we can now offer decent showers, too! Faculty, staff and students in need of a hot shower (even if they don’t want to exercise) are welcome to use the Freeman facilities.

Some Wes students have had the good idea of asking what else we can do for employees who need a helping hand during this crisis. Much of this is already being done informally and effectively, but if faculty or staff have particular requests, they can address them to Human Resources. We will do our best to be helpful.

Classes resumed today, and I was very pleased to hear from some colleagues that the attendance was very good. In my own class, I was delighted to see the eighty-some-odd students ready to talk about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I guess I am an old-fashioned teacher who can’t think of anything he’d rather do than talk about a great book with a group of thoughtful students.

To all the faculty, staff, and students who have pitched in to help in many ways, and to the many others who have provided us with essential support services — thank you! I also want to convey my gratitude to the families of students and to our alumni who have expressed their care and concern. I deeply appreciate your patience and the support you have been showing one another.  It is good to acknowledge that ours is a compassionate community, and that this becomes especially visible in times of need.

We are excited to be welcoming many visitors during Homecoming/Family weekend. There is a big football game against Williams, and many interesting lectures and programs. The Mighty Wes Women’s Soccer Team will be playing at Amherst in the semifinals of the NESCAC tournament. They have had a great run, and we wish them all the best. GO WES!

I don’t plan any further updates for now, but I do look forward to blogging about China, liberal education, theater and athletics. Anything but electricity.