Wesleyan University – Page 5

Committed to International Diversity

February 11, 2020 by Michael S. Roth '78

With all the attention being devoted in recent weeks to the assassination of Suleimani and potential war with Iran, to Ukraine and impeachment, and to China and the coronavirus, it’s easy to lose sight of an isolationist trend in Washington worrisome in its own right. Although not everyone who wants to “make America great” means to cut it off from the rest of the world, the current regime’s isolationist instincts are powerful, persistent and perverse.

This came home to me during my recent trip to India to visit with Wesleyan families and to talk with prospective liberal arts students. Many told me that the United States seems less welcoming than before, and concerned parents wondered whether their children would feel at home in a country that seemed determined to cast foreigners in a harsh light. In some cases, they were attuned to this hostility because they saw their own government in Delhi using similar tactics. I tried to assure them that most Americans were open to meeting foreigners and that our traditions of hospitality remain strong. But they contrasted the current US climate with what they see in Canada, and to some extent in Australia.

Here at Wesleyan, we have a long tradition of collaboration with scholars and teachers from outside the United States. Nobel Prize winning chemist Satoshi Omura still looks back on his time as a researcher at Wes as formative to his experiments in developing new medicines from organic materials. African drummers like Abraham Adzenyah, Javanese gamelan virtuosos like Sumarsam, and dancers like Eiko Otake, have made Wes their home for decades because of its open learning environment, one that cultivates respect for tradition as well as enthusiasm for innovation. I proudly told my interlocutors in India about our longstanding Navaratri Festival of music and dance, and about the recent book by Hari Krishnan on how Bollywood creatively appropriated those traditions.

Shortly after I returned to campus, the Trump administration announced a new set of travel restrictions on people coming to the US. On Jan. 31 the President signed a proclamation banning visa applications from Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar and Nigeria. The reason given was that these countries presented risks because of their security procedures and information sharing. The administration’s announcement also included harsh immigration restrictions for people from Sudan and Tanzania.

The announcement is of a piece with the administration’s goal to restrict immigration of (almost) all kinds. For months in 2019, it refused to sign off on a new framework for refugees – the result being that in October ZERO refugees were legally admitted to the US. That’s the first time a month went by without the US providing legal refuge to someone. When President Trump eventually approved a legal ceiling for those seeking refuge here, it was for a mere 18,000 refugees, an all-time low. Even the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page complained in regard to the latest executive order that “punishing innocent people trying to come to America legally undermines Mr. Trump’s claim that he opposes illegal immigration, not immigrants more broadly.”

At Wesleyan, we value the vibrant, cosmopolitan community that we build in Middletown. About 15% of our students come from outside the US, and we cherish the opportunities to learn from one another. Rather than blocking off parts of the world from interactions with Americans, we believe in building positive, effective interconnectivity. Rather than refusing to listen to others we perceive as different from ourselves, we should cultivate the sharing of stories as a path to a broader more powerful education.

Let’s take Ahmed Badr’s ’20 Narratio project as our inspiration. Ahmed came to the US as a refugee from Baghdad and will graduate from Wesleyan in May. Determined to empower others, he created Narratio which invites youth around the world to share their stories through the publishing of poetry, photography, art and narrative. Already Narratio has published 300+ works across 18+ countries.

Let’s push back against the anti-immigrant, anti-refugee messages coming from Washington. And let’s remember to listen to one another’s stories – lending an ear with special care to those that may come from faraway places.

It’s Almost #GivingTuesday

December 3, 2019December 2, 2019 by Michael S. Roth '78

There is still turkey in my fridge, even though our guests are long gone. Mathilde seems to like the broth on her dog food, and I’ll be enjoying turkey soup for quite some time. I don’t do much shopping online, but I can’t avoid all the Black Friday and Cyber Monday ads. Tomorrow brings a different kind of post-Thanksgiving online transaction: Giving Tuesday.

There are so many ways to express gratitude, and I find a powerful one to be showing generosity toward organizations and people one cares about. A few years ago, my friend Henry Timms (now the president of Lincoln Center in New York) came up with the idea of a “giving day” to follow Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And so #GivingTuesday was born. It’s a simple idea. Just find a way for your family, your community, your company or your organization to act philanthropically. Then tell everyone you can about how you are giving. Generosity is contagious! Be a part of a national celebration of our great tradition of philanthropy.

#GivingTuesday has become internationally recognized as a time to show one’s support for the values and missions one cares about. People all over the world use the occasion to support their favorite causes. This is Wesleyan’s sixth year participating. During that time, thousands of Wesleyan alumni, parents, students and friends have chosen to make donations. Together, we have unlocked millions of dollars in matching funds for financial aid.

Every gift made through Tuesday, December 3, 2019 will be matched with a dollar-for-dollar contribution to Financial Aid, up to $100,000, thanks to the generosity of Stuart Ellman ’88 and Susan Berger Ellman ’90.

I hope you will be giving to your favorite causes tomorrow, and I am especially hopeful that Wesleyan will be among them. Don’t forget about WESUFM, and other university initiatives. There are many worthy causes out there, and this university is very grateful for any and all gifts.

Teaching and Religion

September 12, 2019 by Michael S. Roth '78

This essay on teaching intellectual history courses that take religion seriously builds on some pages in Safe Enough Spaces. It recently appeared in The Atlantic

I had hardly finished my lecture when the student came bounding down the auditorium’s stairs.

“You’re just like all the others,” he said, fuming. “You don’t really take religion seriously.”

This happened a few years ago, when I was teaching a college course on virtue and vice. I had just finished talking about the Catholic thinker Thomas Aquinas. My sin? According to my student, I had “intellectualized” Saint Thomas. I had described his philosophical sources and his historical context, but had said little about the philosopher’s fundamental project—one that had everything to do with the salvation of our souls.

My student’s name, fittingly, was Tom. He was a believer at a secular liberal-arts school, and he was sick of being condescended to either by a campus lousy with self-congratulatory progressives or by teachers (like me, he assumed) who treated religious faith as an inert museum piece. “Wait,” I told him. “Today we talked historical context, and next time we’ll illuminate religious practice.”Tom was a rare exception. As a teacher, I find remarkable resistance to bringing religious ideas and experiences into class discussions. When I ask what a philosopher had in mind in writing about salvation, or the immortality of the soul, my normally talkative undergraduates suddenly stare down at their notes. If I ask them a factual theological question about the Protestant Reformation, they are ready with answers: predestination; “faith, not works”; and so on. But if I go on to ask students how one knows in one’s heart that one is saved, they turn back to their laptops. They look anywhere but at me—for fear that I might ask them about feeling the love of God or about having a heart filled with faith. In my cultural-history classes, we talk about sexuality and identity, violence and revolution, art and obscenity, and the students are generally eager to weigh in. But when I bring up the topic of religious feeling or practice, an awkward silence always ensues.

As a nonbeliever myself, I am not trying to convert any student to any religion. Yet how to discuss religious faith in class poses a major challenge for nonreligious colleges and universities. How can such an institution claim to educate students about ideas, culture, and ways of life if students, professors, or both are uncomfortable when talking about something that’s been central to humanity throughout recorded history?

I teach my classes at Wesleyan University, where I am also the president. For most of its first century, the school was—as its name indicates—firmly in the tradition of the theologian John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. In 1831, Wesleyan’s first president, Wilbur Fisk, articulated the mission of the school as being for “the good of the individual and the good of the world,” drawing on Methodism’s synthesis of deeply personal spirituality and the pursuit of social reform. Indeed, the passion for reform often was energized by that spirituality. In the early 1900s, Wesleyan officially became a secular university, eventually prizing academic freedom and independent research rather than adhering to a set of religious teachings.

Still, Fisk’s words have continued to ring true. Although few of our students today know much about John Wesley’s charismatic preaching or the core tenets of Methodism, many of them are still perfectly comfortable with the idea of finding one’s own good while also doing work in the world that promotes what they now call social justice. If they no longer have a principled spirituality, they need to think hard about what else sustains efforts aimed at justice—and about how politics, ethics, and the nature of knowledge have been intertwined with religious faith and practice.

Yet classroom discussions of these very subjects often seem threatening to even students of faith, who tell me they don’t want to be “outed” on campus. These undergrads encounter mostly secular professors who sometimes treat religious believers as somehow intellectually deficient, or as morally compromised by their commitments to traditions that their teachers have left behind.

These students have ample reason to feel left out. Not long ago, a group of such students at Wesleyan asked me to participate in a discussion about religion on campus, and now it was my turn to try to hide. “Hey,” I said, “I’m an atheist Jew. I’m the wrong guy to talk about these topics.” They pressed: What happened to your commitment to intellectual diversity? I signed up for the event. The organizers had planned a public conversation with Michael Wear, the director of evangelical outreach for President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, and more than 100 students attended, comfortable to be talking about these issues in “safe enough” company. I participated, but while doing so I also explained my reluctance to show up. As a Jew, I worried about the easy slide from “evangelical outreach” to harassment, and then to anti-Semitism. The tension in the room was real, and so were the issues we discussed.

I wasn’t converted to Wear’s liberal evangelicalism that night, and he wasn’t persuaded by my combination of atheism and Torah study. What I took away most of all was the reluctance of students to “bring their whole selves to class”—as we urge all Wesleyan students to do—because of perceived prejudice against faith practices. Now, some may say that students should check their faith at the door (perhaps alongside their privilege) before they enter the seminar room. But that’s not the way I teach. In my classes, I want students to bring their complex, changing identities into our efforts to wrestle with enduring questions of love and judgment, justice and violence, grace and forgiveness. These are historical questions, but they can also be meaningful in students’ lives right now. If we neglect these issues in our liberal-arts classes, we are cutting off a vital domain of human experience from an education claiming to deepen cultural understanding. And we desperately need that understanding in our polarized society.In my next class with Tom, we talked about Aquinas’s connection to Saint Augustine’s “short command,” by which he told the faithful to “love, and do what you will.” We talked about the struggle to bring love and intellect together, about the mystics and their relation to the philosophers. Tom energetically joined our discussion of how religious traditions create practices that link faith and reason and reveal the tensions between them. I didn’t need to be a believer to create space in the classroom for him and others to be fully present to learn. I did have to respect what people of faith brought to the conversation.What my students ultimately believe is none of my business. But they, like all other college students, need to understand what it’s like to be absorbed in robust traditions, including religious ones. They—and I—should refuse to hide behind narrow versions of critical thinking that keep them from engaging with people whose lives are energized by compassion and forgiveness. Becoming more aware of the multiplicity of traditions and practices will make all of us more curious about and more empathetic toward others’ beliefs—and more humble with respect to our own.

Trump Tweets and Higher Education

July 16, 2019 by Michael S. Roth '78

It’s been clear from the time Donald Trump ran for the Republican nomination for president, that he represents a force contrary to the goals of education. My personal political leanings aside, I feel obligated to speak up in defense of the values that animate Wesleyan and so many other schools—values that President Trump attacks on a regular basis. From the denial of science, to the politics of division and cruelty, his irrationality and downright nastiness have been a direct challenge to the research, teaching and inclusion that lie at the core of the mission of colleges and universities. This mission includes promoting intellectual diversity, but it can not abide the politics of racist divisiveness. Condemning President Trump’s attack is not about choosing “sides” in a debate about ideas. It is a defense of what higher education stands for, and of the kind of country in which higher education can thrive.

President Trump’s tweeting tirade against four congresswomen of color this past weekend, telling them to go back to their countries, is just the latest example of racism run amok at the highest level of our government. White supremacists and neo-Nazis are celebrating his administration’s insistence on hate as a vehicle for stimulating the most destructive energies of a sector of the American population.

As many of us plan our return to the campus at the end of the summer, let us imagine alternatives to the noxious brew of racism and xenophobia emanating from the White House. Let us imagine creating a vision for our country as a place of inclusive experimentation — a project that can be achieved only by considering a wide range of ideas that will help us create greater opportunity, freedom and justice. I know these words often conceal hypocrisies and worse, but let’s strive to find ways to make them more real — at least as a civic aspiration for our campus and beyond. We don’t have to live in President Trump’s country of carnage. Let’s return, or turn toward, a country, our country, that we build together.

Welcome Home to Wesleyan!

May 29, 2019May 24, 2019 by Michael S. Roth '78

The reunions are upon us, and it is a glorious spring morning. We’ve been planning for Commencement and for welcoming back a few thousand alumni. Foss Hill looked ready early this morning:

We’ve had plenty to celebrate lately. The women’s lacrosse team is heading to its first Final Four in program history this weekend, and so we had a special graduation ceremony for the seniors on the team. It was fabulous!

While we were holding that special ceremony, the Wesleyan Women’s tennis team was WINNING THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP! It’s our first ever in women’s sports.

Coach Fried was named Coach-of-the-Year and Victoria Yu ’19 was named Senior Player of the year!! Many other awards to come!

Other seniors were practicing their graduation poses, getting ready for the big day:

They invited me to join in, but I’ll have to wait for one of our seniors to send me a photo of me posing with them.

Post your photos from the weekend on social and tag us at #wesreunion or #wes2019.

How to Choose (Our) University

April 15, 2019April 15, 2019 by Michael S. Roth '78

Throughout the month, high school seniors with the acceptance letters in hand, will be visiting campuses as they try to decide where to attend college. They are trying to envision the school at which they will be most likely to thrive. Where will I learn the most, be happiest, and form friendships that will last a lifetime? How to choose? As I do each spring, I thought it might be useful to re-post my thoughts on choosing a college, with a few revisions.

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. Wesleyan has made a commitment to keep loan levels low and to maintain only moderate (very close to inflation) tuition increases. We also offer a three-year program that allows families to save about 20% of their total expenses, while still earning the same number of credits.

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 Pomona?

Students who are visiting campuses this month are trying to discern the personalities of each school. They are trying to imagine themselves on the campus, to get a feel for the chemistry of the place — to gauge whether they will be happy there. That’s why hundreds of visitors come to Wesleyan each week. They go to classes and athletic contests, musical performances and parties. And they ask themselves: Would I be happy at Wesleyan?

I hope our visitors feel the brave 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. Our students have the courage to find new combinations of subjects to study, of people to meet, of challenges to face.

Whatever college or university students choose, I hope they get three things out of their education: discovering what they love to do; getting better at it; learning to share it with others. I explain a little bit more about that in this talk to admitted students a few years ago:

We all know that Wesleyan is hard to get into, especially this year (once again) with a record number of applications. 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 their disciplines. At Wesleyan, 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.

Wolfgang Natter (1955-2018)

May 4, 2018May 4, 2018 by Michael S. Roth '78

Hearing the news this week of the death of my friend, Wolfgang Natter, I walked over to the place we first met – the co-educational fraternity Alpha Delta Phi here on the campus of Wesleyan University. We spent countless hours at the fraternity in the mid 1970s discussing ideas, washing dishes, listening to music, finding ourselves. Together, we projected repeated screenings of Les Enfants du Paradis, debated Hegel and Marx, protested against a world that we also earnestly sought to understand. Entering Alpha Delt, thinking of Wolfgang, I gravitated to the kitchen in which we had been co-workers, sometimes co-conspirators, always friends. The place was bustling with undergrads dealing with the end of the 2018 semester, but I could still feel the force of memories forty years old.

Wolfgang had widely varied interests, and he pursued them with passion. After Wesleyan, he continued his studies at the broadly interdisciplinary Center for the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. He had an abiding interest in the World War I period, a time when, I recall him saying, everything changed. When we were young, he spoke of making a movie about the period, perhaps writing a play. Later, Wolfgang turned his dissertation on the literature of the Great War into a book, Literature at War, 1914-1940: Representing the “Time of Greatness” in Germany. His scholarship managed to be both meticulous and broad-minded – a rarity.

Mostly, I remember Wolfgang’s gentleness, his way of welcoming people into conversations about movies, about German literature or drama, about politics. His mind was sharp, but what stood out was his generosity, his curiosity, his openness. When I lectured at his invitation at the University of Kentucky decades after we graduated from Wesleyan, I learned that Wolfgang had become a leader in a humanistic approach to critical geography and that his intellectual interests had grown to include sophisticated spatial analyses of all sorts of subjects that I had never realized even had a spatial dimension. We spoke for hours about his new lines of inquiry. He had left nothing behind, but his intellectual world was growing fast. I was so impressed by his students, whom he treated as colleagues, and his colleagues, whom he treated as friends. What a mentor he was! I could see the constellation of his qualities – the fierce intelligence, the wide-ranging curiosity, the humor and intellectual curiosity – emerging in his students.

For many years, our paths rarely crossed, but recently we both found ourselves back at Wesleyan. I was now president here, and Wolfgang had come to help us as a consultant before becoming Vice-President for Academic Affairs at the College of St. Scholastica in Minnesota. Joseph, son of Wolfgang and his former wife Liz, was then a student at Wesleyan, and the father had the joy of seeing alma mater through the eyes of his thoughtful and engaged son. Wolfgang also fell in love again at Wesleyan, finding a life-partner in Sarah Kendall, a fellow Alpha Delt and Wes alumna.

Wolfgang was the rare academic administrator who approached the work with open-minded inquiry, with the curiosity and care characteristic of the best research in the humanities. A few weeks before he died, he wrote me with a question about how to help constituents of a school get past points of conflict and return to their deeper mutual convergence. He was so good at finding (sometimes building) convergence while respecting differences. He believed in the spirit of the academic enterprise and exemplified what is best about it. I miss him already.

Hayden White (1928-2018)

March 6, 2018 by Michael S. Roth '78

This morning I learned that the great theorist of history, Hayden White, had passed away overnight. At Wesleyan in the 1970s, Hayden was a stirring, provocative, and welcoming teacher. His presence at the Center for the Humanities was inspirational, and I was fortunate to have studied with him there. Although he left Wesleyan soon after, he remained an important figure for our journal History and Theory, and he returned to campus often. In 2014, he came back to receive an honorary doctorate. Recently, Prof. Ethan Kleinberg conducted a series of interviews with Hayden.

Throughout his long career, Hayden’s work was animated by an emancipatory impulse. He wanted to liberate people from the burdens of history. Here’s what he wrote in the 1960s:

The burden of the historian in our time is to reestablish the dignity of historical studies on a basis that will make them consonant with the aims and purposes of the intellectual community at large, that is, we must transform historical studies in such a way as to allow the historian to participate positively in the liberation of the present from the burden of history.

When he made brief remarks to the Class of 2014 at Commencement, he didn’t tell them to go discover their pasts, to go find out who they really were and then express that. No, Hayden told us all that we weren’t rooted in some authentic past and that we could make out of ourselves something new, something not beholden to someone else’s idea of who we really were and where we had really come from. We could remake the meanings of our pasts, paradoxically, by seizing opportunities to create our futures.

Hayden was a generous interlocutor for those interested in maintaining a commitment to keeping open the question of how we make sense of the past (or choose not to). He was alive to the constraints under which meaning was created, but he was also a champion of finding ways to think otherwise. I remember, as an undergraduate in his seminars, feeling acutely this tension between constraint and creativity. On the one hand, his formalist approach to the great literary and historical texts of the nineteenth century emphasized the tropes that determined a writer’s discourse. On the other hand, he showed time and time again the ways that these same writers defied the structures by which they had seemed bound. He invited his students and his readers to find ways both to recognize the situation that claimed to define them and to defy its boundaries. As a teacher, he showed no interest in training us to be accepted into a profession, and he offered every encouragement to extend the borders of our imaginations. He himself took an ironic stance in the classroom, which enabled his students to recognize that his was merely a stance they could choose or reject, “according to their own moral and aesthetic aspirations.”

Near the very end of his 1973 masterwork, Metahistory, Hayden evokes “the aged Kant,” who thought “we are free to conceive ‘history’ as we please, just as we are free to make of it what we will.” Recently, he returned to Kant and the French existentialists to acknowledge that we come to history not for scientific truth but for aesthetic and ethical guidance. One can turn to history to constrain or to nourish one’s imagination—”history can be a resource and not only a burden,” he emphasized. Indeed, it is imagination that makes history available to us, enabling us to construct what he called a “practical past.”

Hayden White taught that the imagination could push back against academic disciplines, cultural orthodoxies and political ideologies. May his memory as teacher, theorist, writer and friend inspire us to get out from under the burdens of history and make the present and future our own.

Civic Action Plan: Preparedness and Engagement

January 29, 2018 by Michael S. Roth '78

Today Provost Joyce Jacobsen sent a message to the community about Wesleyan’s plans for engagement with the public sphere. She notes: “The purpose of this framework, which will operate within a culture of assessment and continuous improvement, is to guide us in becoming an increasingly “Engaged University” where we build student, faculty, and staff capacity for civic participation, where we prepare our students to engage in civic participation throughout their lives, and where civic responsibility is a visible institutional commitment.”

I have pasted in the “Civic Action Plan” below, and you may send comments about it to: wesprovost@wesleyan.edu.

Civic Action Plan

Wesleyan University’s mission statement promises “an education in the liberal arts that is characterized by boldness, rigor, and practical idealism.” In keeping with that promise, this Plan makes clear that developing civic readiness in our students is not ancillary to our mission but central to it. This plan, which will operate within a culture of assessment and continuous improvement, will guide us in becoming an increasingly “Engaged University” where we prepare our students to engage in civic participation throughout their lives and where civic responsibility is a visible institutional commitment.

Wesleyan has a long history of providing opportunities for working in the public sphere in ways that contribute to the civic education of its students. In recent years, the Allbritton Center has been the primary hub for these activities. Under the Allbritton umbrella, students can engage with the surrounding community through some twenty student-led volunteer and work study programs coordinated by the Jewett Center for Community Partnerships (JCCP); can work alongside community members to run WESU 88.1FM; can support the education of incarcerated people through the Center for Prison Education; can explore, analyze and strategize on how to tackle social issues through the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship; and can take service-learning courses and other classes exploring issues of public life with faculty associated with the Center for the Study of Public Life. Allbritton ensures that information about these various programs is readily available to students, faculty, staff and community members. The University plans to actively support these endeavors and to strengthen them whenever possible.

Of course not all civic engagement at Wesleyan takes place through Allbritton. During the 2016-2017 academic year, the Civic Action Plan Steering Committee gathered input on a wide variety of forms of engagement: Romance Language professors creating a partnership with the local library to have multilingual story time for young children run by undergraduates; faculty and staff serving on boards of local non-profits; athletic teams volunteering and raising funds for charitable organizations; students responding to acute societal needs by creating the Wesleyan Refugee Project. Much of this activity is driven by individual interest and motivation; and there may be occasions when links between siloed initiatives could be beneficial. Our task now is to hone in on programmatic factors that might support, connect and amplify such initiatives. The University will increase its efforts to raise awareness about these activities so as to promote more collaboration.

Programmatic factors (as reported to the Steering Committee) that serve to encourage engagement include transportation support from the JCCP, clear communication of opportunities where they exist, and departmental environments supportive of volunteer work. Factors inhibiting engagement are lack of time, lack of knowledge regarding opportunities (including uncertainty regarding whether on-campus opportunities are solely for students), lack of support from supervisors, and transportation problems. Meanwhile, surveyed members of the off-campus community expressed appreciation to the Steering Committee regarding how the University reaches out into the community and proactively develops collaborative programs. Some were interested in the role the University could play as an economic driver in the community; others emphasized the positive impact of student involvement in a number of local programs. We will amplify those factors that encourage participation and engagement, and lessen the inhibiting factors, thus continuing to expand and support the current positive level of community involvement.

This is a propitious time to develop a plan that cultivates a culture of assessment and continuous improvement with respect to becoming an Engaged University. Some key ingredients of the University – free speech, intellectual diversity, equity and inclusion, academic freedom – are essential for our civic work. Our activities going forward will be organized around three strategies: building student capacity for civic participation; building faculty and staff capacity for civic participation; enhancing the institution’s role in public life. Of these, the first, in keeping with our mission statement, is our highest priority.

Building student capacity for civic participation

Ideally, all Wesleyan students will find opportunities to develop their preparedness to engage in public life. Some of these opportunities they will develop themselves, and it will be important to support them in that effort. In addition, currently Allbritton is a locus of activities for deepening the preparedness of Wesleyan students to engage in public life. Through its community partnerships and other programs, approximately 400 students annually work with individuals and institutions beyond the borders of the campus to solve problems and create opportunities. A new fund for innovation in the JCCP will support creative proposals by our students for additional community-involvement initiatives.

Beyond Allbritton, many academic departments, sports teams and student clubs are promoting volunteerism in ways that provide students with the opportunity to increase their ability to engage in civic affairs. Examples of this include aiding neighborhood schools and working with religious or political organizations. Building on the efforts of the Steering Committee, Wesleyan will create a regular inventory of these volunteer efforts for the purpose of having an overall picture of our civic engagement. How many students are engaged in such activities? Is there anything the university can do to make those efforts more effective? How do these activities develop the capacity for a lifetime of civic participation? Setting quantitative and qualitative metrics in these respects will be important in tracking these activities over time. A dashboard of key indicators will allow Allbritton, in conjunction with Academic Affairs, to adapt engagement strategies within a framework of continuous improvement. Wesleyan pledges to find ways to build on our current practices so as to increase our students’ civic literacy and build their preparedness to engage in political life.

Building faculty and staff capacity for civic participation.

Currently many faculty and staff utilize the dedicated channels of civic participation provided by Allbritton and the University’s annual United Way fundraising drive; some teach science classes for children as part of a research grant, or run for local office, or work with arts organizations that have a civic dimension or with health care providers aiding our region’s most vulnerable groups. Such work on the part of faculty does not go without formal reward; the faculty have developed a protocol so that nontraditional academic work will receive formal consideration as part of tenure and promotion cases, and their civic efforts can also enter into consideration as part of the yearly review process as colleagueship and service.

One direct way in which the university supports the civic engagement of faculty and students is through its support of service learning and community partnership classes. A recent survey showed that alumni who have taken a service-learning course are extremely likely to list that course as one of the most influential courses that they took at Wesleyan. We will continue to support these courses and attempt to improve transportation access to off-campus worksites; and we will continue to provide technical and financial support for faculty to develop service-learning classes. We will also increase the level and professionalism of training for our student volunteers so that they can work more effectively as tutors, researchers, and other participants in nonprofit activities. Towards this end, we are in the process of hiring a Professor of the Practice in Education Studies, one of whose tasks will be to work with our student volunteers in training them to be more effective tutors.

Staff, too, are engaged in a wide variety of civic projects. The JCCP will create an inventory of these activities, as well, working more closely with other institutional entities such as Human Resources, Usdan, and Athletics. Once the University has an even better sense of the range and depth of staff commitments, it can make informed decisions about where institutional support would be welcomed. Support will include increased communication resources, co-sponsorships, and making some university facilities increasingly available in support of civic projects. The University will regularly evaluate whether such support is helping faculty and staff to become more fully engaged in civic life.

Enhancing our institutional role in public life

By developing an understanding of current levels of engagement of students, faculty and staff, by targeting support for improving the quantity and quality of that participation, and by measuring the impact of that support, Wesleyan will enhance its institutional role in public life. What else can be done at the institutional level? It is clearly important to maintain relationships with civic groups in the region, from the Chamber of Commerce to City Hall, from the School Board to the local United Way chapter. We will evaluate what other broad, institutional activities are currently underway and how effective they are. A new coordinator position in the JCCP will support our recently-hired new JCCP director, specifically by coordinating current and creating additional programs that bring community members to campus. The coordinator will work with many units on campus, such as the library, the university collections, and the Center for the Arts to develop a range of age-appropriate activities for local K through 12 students to engage more fully with the wide range of resources that Wesleyan has available to support their education and to increase their awareness of how a university operates internally and involves itself with the community.

Enhancing recognition of Wesleyan’s role in public life is also helpful in creating an atmosphere pervaded by civic energy. Communications will continue to showcase the civic work of students, faculty and staff, as well as our institutional efforts in this area. These efforts include partnerships with other organizations, as well as public stands taken by the university (often through its president) on national issues bearing on its educational mission. Recent examples include becoming a sanctuary campus and advocating against changes in the tax code harmful to students. Communications will evaluate the contribution of such activities to the profile of Wesleyan as a private university with public concerns. The president will continue to promote pragmatic liberal education around the world, and, as part of this, continue to underscore how developing a capacity for civic agency dovetails with this mode of education.

It is a core part of our educational mission to develop bold and rigorous practical idealists, thoughtful and brave participants in the public sphere. Long ago, our founding president, Willbur Fisk, set us on a course of promoting the good of the individual and the good of the world. Our Civic Action Plan will guide us further in that direction.

Semester Underway

January 28, 2018January 28, 2018 by Michael S. Roth '78

I sent this message to the campus a few days ago. My class, The Modern and the PostModern, begins tomorrow….so for me it seems we are just getting underway. I’ve been teaching versions of this course since the 1980s, and around 2000 I thought I’d retire it. But postmodernism, often a bogeyman for one group or another, is back in the news — mostly in relation to President Trump. I’ll share these articles from the New York Times and this video from the Wall Street Journal (start at 5 minutes), as recent examples, but we start with Rousseau and Kant.

Here’s the message that went out to campus:

After a long winter break, I am looking forward to the new semester. Like many faculty, I’ve spent many hours preparing for my upcoming classes, and I’ve tried to dig into some research, too. The teacher-scholar model is at the heart of our enterprise, and Wesleyan is making new tenure-track faculty hires to further strengthen the distinctive education we offer. We have already signed up additional faculty in departments and programs such as Government, Psychology, Music, Science in Society, and Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies.

Promoting civic engagement is part of our educational mission, and shortly we will be sharing a new civic action plan and asking for your views. Ours is an “Engaged University,” and here the Jewett Center for Community Partnerships plays a key role. On February 5, we welcome to campus the Center’s new director, Clifton Watson. On February 15, students, faculty, and staff have another opportunity to be engaged as we host Dr. Joi Lewis, the CEO and founder of Joi Unlimited Coaching and Consulting and the Orange Method, as the speaker at our annual event honoring the legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. More information on the program will be forthcoming.

Wesleyan has set yet another record in admission applications: a total of 12,673! That more talented high school grads than ever want a Wesleyan experience is something about which we can all be proud, because it is our combined efforts that create that experience. Faculty do it through powerful teaching and research, staff do it through effective work on behalf of the university, and students do it through avid appetite for learning coupled with an exuberant, joyful building of community.

Expressing support for the university also contributes – be it by talking to others about Wesleyan or by making a financial contribution. In this last regard, the news is also good. As 2018 begins, we have already raised $27 million towards our annual goal of $35.6 million! We use much of these funds to invest in the long-term future of the institution through endowments that support financial aid, academic programs, and campus learning.

The economic basis on which the Wesleyan experience depends is stronger than ever, though still not strong enough given our ambitions and needs. Of these, improving our facilities is especially important, and how best to do that is something we look forward to discussing with you. We have scheduled forums dedicated to facilities planning on February 6 during common time and on February 13 at 4:30 p.m., both in the Kerr Lecture Hall (Shanklin 107). These forums are open to all faculty, staff, and students, and we want your input.

All of this work, from faculty hires to civic engagement, from admissions and financial aid to facilities enhancement, is in keeping with the planning framework developed in Beyond 2020.

Someone said to me recently that young people have to be brave to pursue a liberal education these days – courageous in the context of environmental and political challenges, in the face of political polarization and economic competition. Yes, I thought, the students I know at Wesleyan are brave, and with the support of faculty, staff, and alumni, defy contemporary pessimism with boldness, rigor, and practical idealism. Let the new semester begin!