Wesleyan Media Project

VOTE!

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Yesterday I sent the following message to all faculty, staff and students at Wesleyan. 

Americans will now cast their votes in one of the most consequential elections in our country’s history. By now, many of us will have already taken advantage of early voting or mailed in absentee ballots to home districts. Others will exercise their right to choose our own leaders by voting on Tuesday. Polls in Connecticut are open from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.

I am proud of the work many of our students, faculty, and staff have done in the runup to Tuesday’s election, including efforts led by Rob Rosenthal Distinguished Professor of Civic Engagement Khalilah Brown-Dean and sociologist/faculty director of the Allbritton Center Robyn Autry. The Wesleyan Media Project has continued its tireless efforts to analyze the endless political advertisements bombarding us these last several months. The participation of so many from our university in the public sphere is one of our great strengths.

Transportation Services and the Jewett Center for Community Partnerships will offer free rides to the polls for our students, with van transportation running every 15 minutes from the steps of Usdan on Wyllys Ave. If voting before or after the workday is not possible for any employee, check with your supervisor today to find a reasonable time to vote during the day on Tuesday. I look forward to seeing the Wesleyan community out in force.

 

Happy Thanksgiving!

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At Thanksgiving I like to express my gratitude to all those who make Wesleyan such an intense, innovative and joyful place. There is so much here to be thankful for this year—beginning with our ability to remain safely together on campus. With common sense precautions, we have been able to accomplish so much: from the Common Moment with the Class of 2026 to celebrating family and friends during Homecoming and Family Weekend, to theater and music productions. We look forward to ending the semester on a high note.

I am always grateful for our faculty and staff contributions. They keep the campus humming with creative energy and contribute to the world around us. Their achievements are plentiful. Recent highlights that come to mind include the work of Alison O’Neil on Alzheimer’s disease, the efforts of Erika Franklin Fowler’s team at the Wesleyan Media Project, Roberto Saba’s award-winning American Mirror and the interdisciplinary efforts of the Carceral Connecticut Project.

I have been heartened, too, to see so many of our students taking an active role in the midterm elections by casting their ballots. As Gloria Steinem told us this summer during Commencement, “Diversity and democracy are like a tree, they grow not from the top down, but from the bottom up. And they are growing, and you are a part of that growing.” I am proud of how we keep diversity and democracy growing at Wesleyan!

Thank you to our students, faculty, and staff, all of whom allow Wesleyan to continue thriving. And thanks to our extended family around the world whose affection and support are vital to the university’s heath. Wishing you a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Dark Money Destroying Democracy

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I’ve already posted about the great work of the Wesleyan Media Project, but I want to point everyone to their new website, AttackAds.org

Many of us are turned off by the negative political advertising that dominates the airwaves– so much of it from groups that don’t have to disclose where their money comes from. The new WMP website puts it this way:

“…a growing body of evidence suggests that ads work better if they are sponsored by unknown groups, which further encourages the growth of dark money. Not only is there no transparency that could help voters better filter the barrage of messages, but there is less accountability in elections. You cannot punish a group in the same way that you can a candidate or a party by not voting for them. This is a problem for democracy. It doesn’t have to be this way, however. This site is intended to help educate Americans on the problems of dark money, who the dark money organizations are, and what you can do about it.”

Negative advertising has become so pervasive and so detached from honesty, that the following may not even seem like a parody:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/-ighWfU8lJU[/youtube]

But here’s the key: IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY!

Defend the possibility of democracy: VOTE NEXT WEEK!!

 

Wesleyan Media Project

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For the past several years, Professor Erika Franklin Fowler has been conducting sophisticated research with her students on American electoral politics. This isn’t surprising; Prof. Fowler is in the Government Department, after all. Like many of her colleagues in that distinguished group, her work has reverberations far beyond campus. In this election cycle, journalists across the country are using analysis from the Wesleyan Media Project. Directed by Prof. Fowler with colleagues from Bowdoin College and Washington State University, the Wesleyan Media Project conducts quantitative and qualitative research to understand more fully the role of spending in races across the country. As the Knight Foundation puts it, “by tracking this data year by year, the project is establishing a reference point that journalists, scholars and citizens can rely on to trace the root of campaign funding and hold officials more accountable.”

More than 20 student researchers are providing real time analysis of spending patterns at a time when many are trying to hide campaign donations. In Sunday’s New York Times, for example the WMP’s work was cited in an article exploring how Democratic donors are coordinating their efforts on a few key messages while G.O.P. spending is far more diffuse. The goals of the WMP are as simple as they are important: “to develop a definitive database that tracks all advertising by source (corporation, union, interest group, party, or candidate), and to enhance the ability of scholars, citizens, and journalists to hold government accountable by providing public information on how special interests are attempting to influence American democracy in general and political campaigns in particular.”

Prof. Fowler was recently interviewed in or quoted on MSNBC, PBS Newshour, Wisconsin Public Radio, WNPR’s “Where We Live”, International Business Times, and Fox CT, among others. Other highlights include stories in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

This is engaged learning at its best! Stay tuned for more research from the Wesleyan Media Project on Oct 13. THIS IS WHY.

 

 

Election Season: Listen, Discuss, Vote

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There is a definite nip in the air, and each day the sun seems just a little more apathetic as it makes its way over the Connecticut River Valley. Fall is here. So are political elections, and the air has been ringing with the sounds of…nastiness. As the Wesleyan Media Project has shown, both sides are playing the negative game. Here in Connecticut, we are treated every day to a barrage of negative advertising in a Senate race pitting a very rich wrestling magnate against a congressman trying to replace Joe Lieberman. Watching this slug-fest is even less entertaining than watching pseudo-wrestling. We’ve all seen fakery before, and so it’s easy to become cynical about the mudslinging.

It’s easy to become cynical about the political process, too, but that would be a big mistake. This election offers some of the starkest choices that American voters have been faced with in generations. This is a time for students to make their voices heard – whomever you are supporting in November. Wesleyan students have a long history of civic engagement – I saw that first-hand when I met with a large group of concerned students last week to talk about financial aid. You can see a video of the forum here. Public support for education in general and student aid in particular are very much in play in this election – and of course that’s just one of many issues on which candidates differ.

Tomorrow (Wed) night some Wesleyan student groups have set up PAC 001 so that the campus community can watch the presidential debate from 9-10:30pm. Usdan will also have snacks and debate in the café area.

If you plan to vote in Connecticut and haven’t registered yet, there’s still time to register. The website of CT’s Secretary of State has all the information you need.

It’s election season. Participate in the process: listen, discuss. And then let’s turn out to vote!

 

Wesleyan Professors and Public Life

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Look for Jennifer Tucker’s excellent op-ed in the New York Times. Jennifer, a professor in history, SiSP, and FGSS, shows how Rep. Akin’s recent inane remarks come out of a long cultural tradition — “in step with medieval science, even if Mr. Akin doesn’t seem quite aware of the similarities.”

The Wesleyan Media Project continues to roll along, tracking political spending in an increasingly nasty campaign. Erika Franklin Fowler was just on NPR, where she made the point that “the most important thing to remember about political advertising is that it matters at the margins.”

It’s easy to get cynical, even disgusted, with the poisonous political ecology of our country right now. Nonetheless, I look forward to seeing how Wesleyan students, like their teachers, manage to engage with the electoral cycle this fall. Whatever one’s ideological perspective, we will be encouraging our students to understand the issues and to participate in the election. There are some dramatic choices to be made!

 

Making a Difference in the Environment — Natural, Political and Cultural

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This evening I read an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times describing how efforts to increase forest density have led to a cascade of negative effects on local and regional eco-systems.  Well meaning attempts to “save the trees” have depleted water reserves and changed weather and soil dynamics. “As temperatures rise,” the authors conclude, “too much forest strangles too many watersheds.” Although the op-ed is brief, its arguments are built on serious research and analysis. I was delighted to see that the authors are Helen M. Poulos and Jamie G. Workman, who have been working together at Wesleyan’s College of the Environment. Helen is a post-doctoral fellow and Jamie is a Visiting Professor in the COE’s think tank. Both have been working with students this year on issues concerning water. Indeed this week they are hearing seniors present their own research, work that usually links environmental science with at least one other field. Barry Chernoff, Schumann Professor of Environmental Science and COE founder, conceived of the think tank as place for rigorous critique and generous collaboration. It’s also a place where scholars can think together about how to translate their research into interventions in the public sphere.

This week has also seen scores of media outlets using the data provided by the Wesleyan Media Project. The WMP’s latest report deals with heavy-duty pollution — the sharp rise in negative ads as compared with the 2008 presidential campaign. Project Director and Assistant Professor of Government Erika Franklin Fowler says that in addition to the rise in negative tone, “60 percent of all ads are sponsored by interest groups, which is really, truly a historic number.” Erika leads a team of student researchers in Middletown who code and analyze data from across the country. This research will become ever more important as the campaign churns along.

Maybe I should close with an example of Wesleyan folks attending to more positive aspects of the environment: all writers on campus working to improve the cultural world we breathe. This past weekend, Amy Bloom ’74, Kim-Frank University Writer in Residence, led Foodstock, a celebration of food and writing about it. From all accounts, the participants had an enlightening, nourishing day — and they also collected quite a bit of money and food for the Amazing Grace Food Pantry.

On Wednesday, May 9 student writing prize winners will read from their poetry and prose at Russell House, starting at 8:00 pm. The student writers who will be reading this evening,  in the this order (thanks to Anne Greene for the information):

Marina Reza ’13 (Herbert Lee Connelly nonfiction award co-winner, along with Jessica Jordan ’13 , who’s abroad)

Katherine Gibbel ’15 (Sarah Hannah Prize, poetry)

Aditi Kini ’13  (Horgan Prize, fiction)

Corey Dethier ’12  (Sophie Reed Prize, poetry)

Anna Swartz ’13  (Wesleyan Fiction Award)

I’m sure that this will be a contribution to our cultural environment that our writers will sustain!

Listening to Wesleyan

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This morning as I was preparing my class, I smiled as I heard yet another report on the impact of campaign spending on the primary elections. The ads in this election cycle, the NPR reporter stressed, have been among the most negative we have ever seen. So, why was I smiling? The analysis was based on reports from the Wesleyan Media Project. Erika Franklin Fowler and her colleagues and students have been busy coding and analyzing data from around the country, enabling us to better understand the impact of big spenders, especially from SuperPacs, on our civic discourse. I wonder if our guest Thursday night will speak to this topic, and to the role of the Citizens United decision in creating our current political climate.

Over the weekend I heard a radio report about Paul Weitz’s (’88) new film, About Flynn. Paul is a proud Wes alumnus who has remained very connected to alma mater. He made a splash not long after graduation with the comedy American Pie (and later Meet the Fockers), and he has worked on animation films (Antz), television (Fantasy Island), and now written and directed the drama About Flynn. Paul also has had a hand in independent movies, online shows, documentaries as well as theater. His play, Lonely, I’m Not, is currently being cast for a run in New York.

On campus the season for senior theses plays and recitals is picking up steam. Sophie and I enjoyed Mao The Musical recently, Alan Rodi’s (’12) opera. When we return from Spring Break there will be a great series of performances by our soon-to-be Wes grads.

On Thursday, March 8 at 3:15 and 4:15, Professor Neely Bruce will lead two performances of The Bill of Rights: Ten Amendments in Eight Motets for two performances in the Wesleyan’s Memorial Chapel. You can read an interview with Prof. Bruce about his music here.

And don’t forget about AuralWes, the website about student music events/concerts on campus. The website is looking for good listeners who are also good writers.

 

Go Positive!

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It’s been more than a little depressing to listen to debate performances over the last couple of months, in which candidates seem to gain in popularity by refining a formula of indignation and hostility. “How dare you,” says the candidate, puffing out his chest, wondering how any questioner could sink so low to ask about a character flaw. The same candidate then dives even lower to cast aspersions on anyone who might be considered a rival.

The research tells us why the candidates “go negative.” It works. SuperPac donors know where to invest, and they are investing in negativity in a big way. The Wesleyan Media Project research shows outside money “went from about 3 percent of total ad airings in the 2008 race to almost half, about 44 percent, in 2012.” As we leave Florida and head out to Nevada, I’m afraid we can only expect more of the same.

I’m embarrassed to say that one of the key places where candidates and citizens acquire a taste for — and skills in — negativity is higher education. For decades now, we have promoted a culture of criticism in which you show how smart you are by tearing apart somebody else’s ideas. That’s a lot safer than showing how you might build your own set of ideas into something meaningful. In my recent book, Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living with the Past, I urge my colleagues to go beyond this culture of criticism to practices of creative exploration. The first off-campus reviewer of the collection couldn’t resist bringing up my dust-up with Zonker Harris. Here is an excerpt from one of the essays in the book, “Beyond Critical Thinking.”

 

I doubt that this [cultivation of negativity] is a particularly contemporary development. In the eighteenth century, there were complaints about an Enlightenment culture that only prized skepticism and that was only satisfied with disbelief. Our contemporary version of this trend, though, has become skeptical even about skepticism. We no longer have the courage of our lack of conviction. Perhaps that’s why we teach our students that it’s cool to say that they are engaged in “troubling” an assumption or a belief. To declare that one wanted to disprove a view would show too much faith in the ability to tell truth from falsehood. And to declare that one was receptive to learning from someone else’s view would show too much openness to being persuaded by an idea that might soon be deconstructed (or simply mocked).

In training our students in the techniques of being critical, we may be giving them reasons to remain guarded — which can translate into reasons not to learn. The confident refusal to be affected by those with whom we disagree seems to have infected much of our cultural life: from politics to the press, from siloed academic programs (no matter how multidisciplinary) to warring public intellectuals. As humanities teachers, however, we must find ways for our students to open themselves to the emotional and cognitive power of history and literature that might initially rub them the wrong way, or just seem foreign. Critical thinking is sterile without the capacity for empathy and comprehension that stretches the self.
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But the contemporary humanities should do more than supplement critical thinking with empathy and a desire to understand others from their own point of view. We should also supplement our strong critical engagement with cultural and social engagement by developing modes of teaching that allow our students to enter in the value-laden practices of a particular culture to understand better how these values are legitimated: how the values are lived as legitimate. Current thinking in the humanities is often strong at showing that values that are said to be shared are really imposed on more vulnerable members of a particular group. Current thinking in the humanities is also good at showing the contextualization of norms, whether the context is generated by an anthropological, historical, or other disciplinary matrix. But in both of these cases, we ask our students to develop a critical distance from the context or culture they are studying.

Many humanities professors have become disinclined to investigate with our students how we generate the values we believe in, or the norms according to which we go about our lives. In other words, we have been less interested in showing how we make a norm legitimate than in sharpening our tools for delegitimization. … If we humanities professors saw ourselves more often as explorers of the normative rather than as critics of normativity, we would have a better chance to reconnect our intellectual work to broader currents in public culture. This does not have to mean an acceptance of the status quo, but it does mean making an effort to understand the practices of cultures (including our own) from the point of view of those participating in them. This would include an understanding of how cultures change. For some, this would mean complementing our literary or textual work with participation in community, with what are often called service-learning courses. For others, it would mean approaching our object of study not with the anticipated goal of exposing weakness or mystification but with the goal of turning ourselves in such a way as to see how what we study might inform our thinking and our lives.
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The fact that language fails according to some impossible criterion, or that we often create misunderstandings in our use of it, is no news, really. It is part of our finitude, but it should not be taken as the key marker of our humanity. The news that is brought by the humanities is a way of turning the heart and the spirit so as to hear in the languages people use the possibilities of various forms of life in which we might participate. When we learn to read or look or listen intensively, we are not just becoming adept at exposing falsehood or at uncovering yet more examples of the duplicities of culture and society. We are partially overcoming our own blindness by trying to understand something from another’s artistic, philosophical, or historical point of view. … Of course hard-nosed critical thinking may help in this endeavor, but it also may be a way we learn to protect ourselves from the acknowledgment and insight that humanistic study has to offer. As students and as teachers, we sometimes crave that protection because without it we risk being open to changing who we are. In order to overcome this blindness, we risk being very uncomfortable indeed.

My humanities teachers enriched my life by showing me details and patterns and relations. In so doing, they also helped me to acquire tools that have energetically shaped my scholarship and my interactions with colleagues and students. It is my hope that as guides, not judges, we can show our students how to engage in the practice of exploring objects, norms, and values that animate diverse cultures. In doing so, students will develop the ability to converse with others about shaping the objects, norms, and values that will give substance and character to their own lives. They will develop the ability to add value to (and not merely criticize values in) whatever organizations in which they participate. They will often reject roads that others have taken, and they will sometimes chart new paths. But guided by the humanities they will increase their ability to find together ways of living that have meaning and direction, illuminating paths immensely practical and sustaining.

 cross-posted from Huffingtonpost