Liberal Education

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.

Spring Travels, Vacation Thoughts

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Kari and I have been on vacation this first week of Spring Break. We’ve returned to Paris, a city we both lived in when we were in our student years, and in which we have spent extended periods of time in the time since. Although this was not a Wesleyan trip, we spent a few hours at the Wesleyan-Vassar program here. It was great to meet some of the staff and talk with some students who are spending the spring semester in France. Studying in a foreign country, especially when you are immersing yourself in another language, can be such a powerful complement to a broad, liberal arts education. There are so many things you have to re-consider when you are living outside the US, not the least being your own views of home. One starts to see oneself and one’s culture through the eyes of others — usually a strong learning experience.

Our students in France are studying art history, politics, history and, of course, French literature. Some want to explore psychology, while others are attracted to geography, science studies and philosophy. All of these things are often grouped here under the rubic of “human sciences,” and recently there has been a reinvigoration of the term “humanities” in French. Kari and I went to hear the inaugural lecture of a new Humanities Institute in Paris, at the Diderot campus (Paris 7). The feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti made a strong case for a “post-anthropocentric,” integrative version of the humanities that would be as interdisciplinary as anything we have seen in the states.

We’ve spent much of the week seeing old friends, listening to music and looking at art. We heard about new trends in philosophy, and Kari was especially interested to learn about the important number of philosophers who are now investigating “the problem of the animal.” Her new book, Thinking Animals, is about to come out from Columbia University Press. We saw a wonderful exhibition on Matisse, in which the decisions the painter made when confronted with certain visual/cognitive problems were brought to the fore. This reminded me of how Tula Telfair has recently discussed her work. We also saw fantastic, disturbing exhibition at the Musée Branly, L’Invention du Sauvage. The English title for the catalogue is The Human Zoo, and the two titles together give a good idea of the subject matter: the creation and display of the colonial Other as exotic — even antihuman. This exploration of the genealogy of racialism and racism reminded me of Andy Curran’s recent book, Anatomy of Blackness. And I couldn’t help wonder what our dance faculty would think of the great exhibition on dance and the arts at the Centre Pompidou, Danser sa Vie.

It’s not as if I think only of Wesleyan when visiting Paris. I promise, nothing red and black came to mind when we saw the exhibition on Degas’ nudes!

We’ll soon be home to prepare for the rush of the second half of the semester. There will be music to hear, and exhibitions to see as the senior theses continue to unfold. And friends, new and old, to share stories of Paris with.

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

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.

Choosing Classes, Choosing Majors (Certificates? Minors? Clusters?)

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Wesleyan students are busily deciding on the classes they intend to take next semester. It’s an exciting and sometimes frustrating time. Students may have heard since their first term about Don Moon’s government class on the moral basis of politics (a top choice since I was an undergrad), while others will be eager to learn about the history of architecture from Joseph Siry (whose classes have also been popular for a very long time), or from Katherine Kuenzli, (whose class on Wagner and Modernism is cross-listed in 5 depts!). If students want to take a very popular course with limited enrollments, then they may well be frustrated. But a good antidote to this is to go to Wesmaps and search for classes with free seats (just check that box). You are likely to discover some real gems — be they classes in data analysis or biology, to classes in religion or a brand new new one on the history of the European novel.

As students plan for the spring term, sophomores in particular are thinking through how they will focus their studies. Choosing a major can seem very difficult, especially if one has diverse interests. It’s crucial that students talk this through with their advisors. I remember not being able to choose among philosophy, psychology and history — and then a dean asked me why I thought I had to choose. I wound up creating a university major that combined these fields. Today, many students double major, while others add certificates (much like an interdisciplinary minor) or other points of focus. I always suggest that students worry less about how their major(s) will look to others after graduation and focus more on what they are most interested in. What is it that generates your greatest intellectual passion? Your major will let you deepen that passion and discover how it might be relevant to what you do after graduation.

Professors are busy too, of course. Not only are we grading exams and papers from the fall, but we are thinking about those spring courses and how to make them as compelling as possible. I’ve been teaching the Past on Film since the Ice Age, but next term it will be very different than in previous years — we are going discuss how photography makes a difference in our cultural and personal recollections. We’ll also be looking at several films that hadn’t made it onto the syllabus in prior years.

We professors also look forward to seeing where our intellectual passions lead us. Our journeys are informed by the engagement with the interests of our students as we continue learning together.

Out West (so far that it was East)

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In the week of Fall Break (before the storm and the power outage), I was in Berkeley and then Beijing giving lectures and attending a colloquium. At the University of California at Berkeley, I spoke to a group interested in the intersection of arts and humanities research with liberal learning, and with another research group focused on critical theory. Here are the video links through UC Berkeley:

http://www.youtube.com/user/UCBerkeleyEvents#p/u/8/JjR4yFYzmQY

http://www.youtube.com/user/UCBerkeleyEvents#p/u/10/YsUmCqQ_jQk

The  scholarly meeting in Beijing was jointly organized by the Chinese Academy of Social Science and Wesleyan, with special leadership from our journal in the philosophy of history, History and Theory.

The theme of our discussions was “tradition,” and the meeting was structured around twenty essays, half written originally in English and half in Chinese. Translators did yeoman’s service in preparing the written materials in advance and in providing simultaneous translations throughout our discussions. Here in this photo is our great translator Guofei with philosophy professor Stephen Angle:

I was very interested to learn that the question of traditional culture has become an important topic for Chinese humanists and social scientists. People start talking about tradition when it is being put under pressure, and the extraordinarily rapid economic growth and social changes in China have led many in the scholarly and political worlds to reflect on what is being lost during the recent push towards modernization. There was much discussion by our Chinese colleagues of the resources available to the present from the long history of Confucianism, now coupled with varieties of what they referred to as dialectical thinking. Our host, Prof Gao, gave a fascinating presentation on how during the Ming dynasty there was a current of liberalization that took classical traditions as its enemy. Today, though, this current is itself a tradition that can be reactivated.

We discussed, thanks to Debra Satz (a philosopher from Stanford), how market forces often undermine traditions even as they depend on them to work properly. Wesleyan faculty Steve Angle, Joe Rouse, Ethan Kleinberg and Phil Pomper all contributed essays that examined historical and philosophical aspects of the topic — from neo-Confucianism to Russian state power, from science to critical theory. We missed having Vera Schwartz with us, though she provided invaluable planning advice.

In conversation with our Chinese colleagues, we all learned about specific issues in intellectual history, and I certainly became more alert to how our usual frames of reference are very much situated in a particular American context. And you can see from the photo that our Wes context as represented in China was too male.

My presentation at the meeting dealt with what I called “the tradition of anti-tradition in American views of education.” I focused on views that linked education and freedom, and on the Emersonian notion of self-reliance. I was surprised and delighted when Prof. Gao quoted Emerson in his concluding remarks at the conference.  I also lectured about liberal arts education at Beijing Normal University. The group of faculty and grad students there were especially interested in breaking away from narrow, vocational forms of higher education. I learned so much from their thoughtful questions and concerns. Here are some links to news reports in China about the meeting:

1. Xinhua,
http://news.xinhuanet.com/photo/2011-10/28/c_122211192_4.htm
2. China Daily
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/zgrbjx/2011-10/28/content_13998853.htm
3. Netnews
http://news.163.com/11/1028/21/7HFVVLLN00014JB5.html
4. Hexun news
http://news.hexun.com/2011-10-28/134675182.html
5. China Academy of Social Science (notes)
http://www.cssn.cn/news/422865.htm
6. 21CN
http://news.21cn.com/caiji/roll1/2011/10/28/9601196.shtml

The China social science press billed this the first high-level Sino-American Research Exchange. We plan to have the next meeting in Middletown, probably in 2013. The theme, Unfinished Enlightenment, will build on the work we did for this meeting, and I am confident it will make the Middletown-Beijing axis a powerful one in the humanities and social sciences.

Traveling with the Liberal Arts Message

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I’ve been on the road for the last several days, visiting the University of California at Berkeley’s Townsend Humanities Center to give two lectures.

http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/publicworld_roth.shtml

http://townsendlab.berkeley.edu/critical-theory/events/michael-roth-trauma-shame-photography-guilty-thoughts-emotional-teacher

The first had to do with the long tradition of liberal arts education in the United States, and how we must defend and reinvigorate that tradition today. The second was based on my my scholarly work on photography and critical theory, with particular attention to how one might face pedagogical challenges in contexts in which affect is running very high. These were filmed, so they should be on the web soon.

I had the opportunity to visit the California College of the Arts campus in San Francisco. It’s a high energy place, and I was so pleased to feel the vibrancy of the work on architecture, design, and art that I saw displayed.

CCA in San Francisco

I visited with some alumni while in the Bay Area, and several Wes folks came out to UC to hear the talks. It was great to see them!

I am now in Bejing to participate in a colloquium on Tradition co-sponsored by Wesleyan and the Social Science in China Press.

Our philosophy of history journal History and Theory has spearheaded this joint program, with great leadership from Professors Steve Angle and Ethan Kleinberg. It’s my first trip to China, and though it will be very short, I’m looking forward to building ongoing relationships with our colleagues here. I’m also giving a lecture at Beijing Normal University on why liberal arts matter and will get together with alumni before heading home. I have to be ready for class on Monday!

Essays on Living With the Past

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Very exciting news for me today. A new collection of my essays arrived at Broad Street Books. Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living With the Past has just appeared from Columbia University Press (http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14568-8/memory-trauma-and-history). Some of the essays, like those on the history of medical thinking about memory disorders, date from several years ago. I wrote others, like those on photography, critical theory, and liberal education, since returning to Wesleyan as president. It’s a thrill to see them collected in this volume, especially with the cover image by my friend David Maisel, a wonderful California photographer. You can see more of his work at: http://davidmaisel.com/.

Innovative University

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This past weekend the trustees were in Middletown for their annual retreat. Our theme this year was “the innovative university,” and we worked together to think through how Wesleyan might get out in front of some of the major changes in higher education. Technology, of course, is driving many of these changes, as is a strong desire (for many) to lower the cost of education while making it more vocational. In this context, how could Wesleyan preserve and build upon some of its great traditions of scholarship and learning while also creating opportunities for new modalities of education in the future? How do we expect student learning and faculty research to change over the next decades, and in what ways can Wesleyan contribute to making those changes as positive as possible? These were some of the broad issues the Board discussed with faculty, staff and student representatives.

We have been using Wesleyan 2020 and a strategy map that complements it as a framework for allocating resources and planning the future of the university. We have three overarching goals that animate all our other objectives: to energize Wesleyan’s distinctive educational experience; to enhance recognition of the university as an extraordinary institution; to maintain a sustainable economic model. At the retreat we talked about a number of possible innovations that would be “disruptive” — that would change the platform for the educational experience of students. These ranged from significantly changing the time to degree, to collaborating with other institutions for joint programs, to adding many more online opportunities to our curriculum. I am particularly interested in how we can contain the cost of a degree while simultaneously offering every student opportunities to participate in the arts, athletics, internships, and independent research. There is no doubt that doing all this while maintaining our capacity to support original work by faculty will be especially challenging. But it is a challenge we take on because of our belief that the deepest educational experience depends on the scholar-teacher model.

Like many of the trustees, faculty, and students present, I left the meeting thinking that the urge to streamline education to meet some imagined vocational standard was a big mistake. At many other institutions, under the guise of “innovation,” calls for a more efficient, practical college education are likely to lead to the opposite: men and women who are trained for yesterday’s problems and yesterday’s jobs, men and women who have not reflected on their own lives in ways that allow them to tap into their capacities for innovation and for making meaning out of their experience. Under the pretense of “practicality” we are really hearing calls for conformity, calls for conventional thinking that will impoverish our economic, cultural and personal lives.

Hearing the passionate dedication of our trustees, I felt energized to rethink how we might change Wesleyan while remaining true to its core values. The mission of universities focused on liberal learning should be, in Richard Rorty’s words, “to incite doubt and stimulate imagination, thereby challenging the prevailing consensus.” Through doubt, imagination and hard work, students “realize they can reshape themselves” and their society. At Wesleyan, we recognize that challenging the prevailing consensus can actually enrich our professional, personal and political lives. The free inquiry and experimentation of our education help us to think for ourselves, take responsibility for our beliefs and actions, and be better acquainted with our own desires, our own hopes. Our education contributes not only to our understanding of the world but also to our capacity to reshape it and ourselves. That may be the most profound innovation of all.