In the book, Roth takes a pragmatic and empathetic approach to the challenges facing higher education. He offers important historical, sociological, and economic context, as well as firsthand observations from his decades as a higher ed administrator, to debates over free speech, political correctness, safe spaces, affirmative action, and inclusion. As the book’s title suggests, he envisions a higher education space that is “safe enough” for students to openly explore new ideas and perspectives—even those that are unpopular or cause discomfort—and where no idea is protected from reasoned challenge.
On Aug. 15, Wesleyan unveiled a new Cardinal—a modern and bold bird that looks to our future while paying tribute to our past.
The new Cardinal is being introduced in connection with the University’s core messaging project, which has been rolled out over the past year. It is part of an overall updated look and feel for Wesleyan Athletics, which captures the recent historic success of the program, and for the university as a whole. University Communications worked in close partnership with the coaching staff in designing the new Cardinal, and took input from faculty, staff, alumni, and students throughout the project.
“The previous Cardinal was developed in the early 2000s, long before digital and social media became dominant forms of communication. That mark was challenging to use in the digital realm, where vibrant and flexible graphics thrive,” explained Marketing Director Deb Katz.
In this op-ed, Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies, Emeritus Gary Yohe and his coauthors write that they are encouraged by the “unprecedented attention being given to climate change among those vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination” and offer words of advice for creating an ambitious but credible climate policy.
The photography of Isabella Convertino ’20 is featured on this website, an independent publisher of new photographic art. According to the article, “Her work has been published by ROMAN NVMERALS press, and was recently acquired by the MoMA library. Convertino’s images speak to the complications of adolescence, compounding memory and trauma as points of departure. Interested in the interplay between familial and gender structures, her work probes modes of power-inheritance and the potential devastation of genetic happenstance.”
Martha Gilmore, the George I. Seney Professor of Geology, is quoted in this article on new research suggesting that, contrary to popular belief, the surface of Venus actually may be quite active today. “Venus is an Earth-sized planet and now—who knew?!—there are Earth-sized planets all over the galaxy,” said Gilmore. “So now, Venus is even more relevant for that reason.”
Sixty-eight Center for Creative Youth (CCY) participants from around the country and the world recently demonstrated the skills they had learned in just a week of intensive art study during a community share day. Wesleyan assumed leadership of CCY in fall 2018 as an official University program, and this is the first time the camp has been offered under Wesleyan’s management.
Amin Abdul-Malik Gonzalez ’96 has been hired as Wesleyan’s new vice president and dean of admission and financial aid, President Michael Roth announced in an email to campus on July 17. He will begin in August.
Gonzalez, who was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and earned his bachelor’s degree in history at Wesleyan, previously worked in the University’s Office of Admission as an associate dean in the late 1990s and 2000s. In this role, he selected, trained, and supervised the senior interviewers; coordinated the University’s fall Ambassador Program and supported spring yield efforts; served on the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and University Scholarship selection committees; and worked with the QuestBridge partnership team.
“Since Wesleyan is both where I learned to think critically as an undergrad and got my start in the admission field two decades ago, I’m incredibly excited and honored to serve as its next dean of admission and financial aid,” said Gonzalez. “I look forward to collaborating closely with members of my team, senior administrators, faculty, current students, alumni, and community partners to ensure Wes continues to attract, enroll, and graduate some of the most exceptionally talented, socially conscious, and dynamically diverse students from across the country and around the globe.”
Student research assistant Sophie Charles ’20, a neuroscience and behavior major, shows the line estimation task used by the Psychology Department to understand how people make judgments about number and quantity.
Hilary Barth and Andrea Patalano, both professors of psychology, have received a major grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support collaborative research on numerical cognition.
Collaborative research by Hilary Barth and Andrea Patalano is supported by the National Science Foundation.
The three-year $1,091,303 grant, which is funded by NSF’s EHR Core Research program focused on STEM learning, includes support for Wesleyan student participation in the proposed research project, which will involve experimental studies of children’s and adults’ understanding of, and judgments about, number and quantity.
The two labs collaborate frequently, and have been working jointly on another project for the past three years supported by an earlier NSF grant. The new project is distinct, but grew out of a discovery made in the Barth lab during the earlier project related to a number line estimation task. In this task, participants are shown a line with numbers at each endpoint (e.g., 0 and 1,000) and asked to estimate where on the line a particular three-digit number would fall. The researchers found that participants had a tendency to place two numbers much farther apart on the line than they actually were when those numbers had a different first digit, even if they were quite close to each other in actuality (for example, 799 and 802). This was true even of adult participants, who have a good understanding of numbers.
Wesleyan faculty frequently publish articles based on their scholarship in The Conversation US, a nonprofit news organization with the tagline, “Academic rigor, journalistic flair.” In a new article, Assistant Professor of Government Ioana Emy Matesan and Ronit Berger of Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya write about their research trying to understand when and why armed groups apologize for their mistakes. They hope this research will help to find ways to negotiate resolutions during conflicts.
Why Do Rebel Groups Apologize?
Armed groups often rely on violence and instilling fear to show strength and resilience. And yet, every so often, they are willing to apologize when things go wrong.
The New IRA recently apologized for killing Lyra McKee, an investigative journalist, during a riot in Derry. The group’s targets, which they described as “enemy forces,” were officers of the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
On June 17, Wesleyan employees moved outdated furniture from the High Rise apartments into a truck. The contents will be donated to IRN, an organization that recycles and finds new homes for the furniture.
Every summer, when campus is relatively quiet, the Facilities Team is hard at work maintaining, renovating, and upgrading all of Wesleyan’s buildings and grounds. Part of this work involves the large-scale replacement of furniture in residential facilities—a process that has recently been made more environmentally friendly thanks to a partnership with IRN, an organization dubbed “The Reuse Network.”
According to Jeff Sweet, Wesleyan’s associate director of facilities management, the University has partnered with IRN for the past three years to recycle old residential furniture that is being replaced. IRN “matches the needs of charities and nonprofits throughout the world with surplus furnishings and equipment from schools, universities, corporations, and other large organizations,” according to its website. IRN estimates it has saved 80 million pounds of surplus from ending up in landfills.
President Michael Roth ’78 participated in a panel discussion at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
On June 18, President Michael Roth ’78 participated in a panel discussion titled, “Protesting the Podium: Campus Disinvitations” at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C. He spoke alongside three individuals who were involved in higher education disinvitation incidents—former U.S. senator Bob Kerrey, Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield, and Middlebury professor Matthew J. Dickinson—in a wide-ranging discussion that covered such high-profile disinvitations, as well as broader questions of free speech, inclusion, and safe spaces on campuses. Roth’s latest book, Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses, due out from Yale University Press in August, focuses on these issues facing colleges today.
In his remarks, Roth pointed out that despite the dominant narrative in the media, college students today have a higher devotion to the concept of free speech than older generations, according to some measures. However, he said, “Our students are very suspicious of the use of free speech to advance particular political agendas. And when they hear that there’s a ‘wrong’ kind of free speech and a ‘right’ kind of free speech, and the right kind of free speech sounds a lot like civility as practiced by a certain kind of person with a certain social class and standing, they’re even more suspicious.”
Anna Tjeltveit of Allentown, Penn., winner of the 2019 Wesleyan University Hamilton Prize for Creativity, is profiled. She shares how her winning submission, a one-act play titled, “Five Steps,” came together at the last minute, and discusses her early career in theater as well as her plans for her time at Wesleyan.
Cole Goco of Arlington, Va., who received an honorable mention in the 2019 Wesleyan University Hamilton Prize for Creativity, is interviewed. He discusses his years-long work on his winning web comic strip, “Billy the Pop,” and what it felt like to have Lin-Manuel Miranda ’02 congratulate him by name on Twitter.
Wesleyan faculty frequently publish articles based on their scholarship in The Conversation US, a nonprofit news organization with the tagline, “Academic rigor, journalistic flair.” In a new article, Professor of Religion Peter Gottschalk writes about the history of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim movements in the U.S., and the confluence of the two.
Hate crimes associated with both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism have a long history in America’s past
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar tweeted recently that “Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are two sides of the same bigoted coin.”
Hate crimes associated with both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism have shown an increase in recent years. But is there an association between the two?
As author of “American Heretics,” I have found that American antagonism toward Islamic and Jewish traditions goes back nearly 500 years, and shares some unfortunate connections.
Wesleyan faculty frequently publish articles based on their scholarship in The Conversation US, a nonprofit news organization with the tagline, “Academic rigor, journalistic flair.” In a new article, Professor and Chair of Economics Richard Grossman analyzes the latest jobs report.
May jobs report suggests a slowing economy – and possibly an imminent interest rate cut
The latest jobs data suggests an interest rate cut may be imminent.
The Labor Department reported on June 7 that U.S. nonfarm payroll employment increased by 75,000 in May, while the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 3.6%. This level of job creation was well below economists’ forecasts of about 185,000 new jobs, as well as below the average monthly increase of 164,000 in 2019 and 223,000 in 2018.
Although it’s difficult – even for an economist like mewho studies economic policy – to interpret the data reported in any one jobs report as the beginning of a trend, the latest numbers do suggest the Federal Reserve may have to lower its benchmark interest rate to shore up the economy.
That may happen as soon as this month, when the Fed’s interest rate-setting panel, the Federal Open Market Committee, convenes its next meeting June 18-19. A cut would be a sharp reversal from Fed policy as recently as December, when it last raised the rate.
Wesleyan faculty frequently publish articles based on their scholarship in The Conversation US, a nonprofit news organization with the tagline, “Academic rigor, journalistic flair.” In a new article, John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of Astronomy Bill Herbst and Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences James Greenwood write about the model they’ve proposed for how the most common kind of meteorites form—a mystery that has dogged scientists for decades.
The tell-tale clue to how meteorites were made, at the birth of the solar system
April 26, 1803 was an unusual day in the small town of L’Aigle in Normandy, France – it rained rocks.
Over 3,000 of them fell out of the sky. Fortunately, no one was injured. The French Academy of Sciences investigated and proclaimed, based on many eyewitness stories and the unusual look of the rocks, that they had come from space.
The Earth is pummeled with rocks incessantly as it orbits the Sun, adding around 50 tons to our planet’s mass every day. Meteorites, as these rocks are called, are easy to find in deserts and on the ice plains of Antarctica, where they stick out like a sore thumb. They can even land in backyards, treasures hidden among ordinary terrestrial rocks. Amateurs and professionals collect meteorites, and the more interesting ones make it to museums and laboratories around the world for display and study. They are also bought and sold on eBay.
Despite decades of intense study by thousands of scientists, there is no general consensus on how most meteorites formed. As an astronomer and a geologist, we have recently developed a new theory of what happened during the formation of the solar system to create these valuable relics of our past. Since planets form out of collisions of these first rocks, this is an important part of the history of the Earth.
This meteor crater in Arizona was created 50,000 years ago when an iron meteorite struck the Earth. It is about one mile across. (Photo by Bill Herbst, CC BY-SA)
President Michael Roth ’78 is the author of a new book, Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses, published Aug. 20 by Yale University Press.
In this recurring feature in The Wesleyan Connection, we highlight some of the latest news stories about Wesleyan and our alumni.
