Wesleyan in the News: October 2024

The Associated Press interviewed President Michael S. Roth ’78 for a story on campus free speech on the one-year anniversary of the attacks of October 7. He talked about the ways Wesleyan is trying to foster discourse, including new courses on civil disagreement and faculty facilitation of conversation. “It’s challenging for students, as it is for adults — most adults don’t have conversations with people who disagree with them,” Roth said. “We’re so segregated into our bubbles.”  

Roth spoke about how to navigate disagreement on campus, “safe enough spaces,” related campus activity to democratic practice at an event for the New York Institute of the Humanities. His appearance was published as an episode of the New Books Network’s “American Politics” podcast. 

Roth reviewed “No Road Leading Back” by Chris Heath for the Wall Street Journal. The book chronicles the few survivors of the horrors committed in the forest region of Ponar, outside of the now Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, in 1941 during the Holocaust.  

Richard Slotkin, Olin Professor of English, Emeritus wrote a piece for The New York Times about how core American myths help explain the current state of our politics. “In the absence of a unifying national myth, the states are dividing along ideological lines, as they did before the Civil War period and again in the Jim Crow era, with radically different laws on voting, on abortion and public health, on racial discrimination, on gun rights, on fossil fuels and green alternatives, and on the teaching of history,” Slotkin wrote in the Times. 

Sltokin discusses these myths in detail in his new book “A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America.,” which was reviewed by Los Angeles Review of Books and History Today.The Wesleyan Media Project reported that Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign significantly outspent former President Donald Trump’s on television and digital advertising from Sept. 9 to 22. The Washington Post highlighted their research in a piece on Sept. 27. 

Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich mentioned a Wesleyan Media Project report that Trump’s campaign is spending almost nothing on ads that show him in a positive light, instead focusing on negative ads about Harris, in his daily newsletter. 

Erika Franklin Fowler, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project and professor of government, spoke at a panel on voting at Eastern Connecticut State University. “In 2016, the Trump campaign surprised many by revealing post-election that half of its campaign budget was spent on digital advertising,” said Franklin Fowler. “Fast forward to 2024, and the Trump campaign is being outspent on Meta platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, at a ratio of 16-to-1 in the early weeks of September.” 

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel spoke with Michael Franz, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, for a story on ad spending in Wisconsin’s Senate race ahead of this year’s election. More than $100 million has reportedly been spent on the race from outside groups. “The involvement of outside groups makes sense, since the Wisconsin race is critical for both parties and the fight over who will control the Senate,” Franz said. 

Merve Emre, Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism and director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism, explored eight stories by writer Oğuz Atay for The New Yorker. Atay’s stories were collected into a book Waiting for the Fear in 1975 and reissued by the New York Review of Books this month. “There is an aggressive intimacy to Atay’s style, a perverse hospitality to his postmodern tales of indignation and woe. To read these stories is to be forcefully ushered into the home of a friend, to listen to him rant, yet to find his bizarre performance endearing, even lovable.” 

Emre also edited a collection of short stories by author Djuna Barnes. She wrote a foreword for the book that was published in The New York Review of Books. 

Khalilah Brown-Dean, Rob Rosenthal Distinguished Professor of Civic Engagement of Civic Engagement and executive director of the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, is editing a new series, “At Issue,” for Diverse Education. It features engaged scholars who study issues of importance ahead of the upcoming election. The series is centered on policy questions and action-based strategies.

Brown-Dean and actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, artist-in-residence at the Center for the Arts, will be keynote speakers at the Artistic Congress, according to BroadwayWorld Connecticut. Wesleyan, The Long Wharf Theatre, and Yale Schwarzman Center are hosting the three-day event focused on fostering collaboration and conversations about the future of theater and its importance to democracy from Oct. 25 to 27. 

Peter Rutland, Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor in Global Issues and Democratic Thought, spoke to Newsweek for a piece on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent announcement loosening the country’s nuclear doctrine, which is viewed by some as a threat to potentially use nuclear weapons in the war in the Ukraine. Rutland said the comments did not represent a substantial change in the policy position. “Russia claims that the war is going well for them, with incremental territorial gains in Donbas and a harsh winter looming in Ukraine given the damaged energy infrastructure,” Rutland told Newsweek. 

The Council on Foreign Relations welcomed David Hart ’83, P’24, professor of public policy at George Mason University, to the David Rockefeller Studies Program as senior fellow for climate and energy. Hart has worked to increase funding for federal energy research and development, the establishment of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, and is a lifetime fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science—the largest multidisciplinary scientific society in the world.