Campus News & Events

The Class of 2028 gathered on Andrus Field for a joyful celebration on Aug. 30. More than 600 first-year students took part in the 17th annual “Common Moment” as part of new student orientation. The celebration also included new transfer students from both the Class of 2027 and the Class of 2026. Joshua Lubin-Levy 06, director of the Center for the Arts, said the “Common Moment” is an opportunity during orientation for new students to get out of their heads and into their bodies, feeling and sensing the world around them through dance as they reflect on the kind of…

Arrival Day is the first step in the next stage of the lives of Wesleyan’s Class of 2028. For these students, it was the first time they were able to see inside their dorms at Clark Hall, Bennet, the Butterfields, and also the first time they could put their personal stamp on the walls of their spaces away from home — with an unsettlingly green brat poster or a vinyl from an old rock band to show their new cohort of friends. For hundreds of Wesleyan’s newest first-year and transfer students, it was also the first day of the next…

Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts (CFA) opens the 2024-25 season with a wide range of special exhibitions and performances that encourage interactions and exchanges between visiting artists and the campus community. The CFA’s season also features artists in residence who integrate themselves into campus life as they incubate new work. CFA Director Joshua Lubin-Levy ‘06 and his curatorial team create opportunities for audiences to explore the way art can build new points of connection between otherwise discrete aspects of life and learning. “I invite students, faculty, and visitors to consider the CFA as more than a space, but rather…

Navy veteran Orion Cox ’28 once viewed higher education as a box to check before beginning his post-military career. After completing two Warrior-Scholar Project educational boot camps, however, his perspective changed. “Now I view college as a place to grow and become a better version of yourself,” Cox, 24, said. A Seattle native, Cox spent five years in the military as an air traffic controller to pay for his education, but he dreams of becoming a composer. He said he’d love to score an animated feature film one day. He enrolled at Wesleyan and will begin studying music in the…

During its 50th anniversary season, the Center for the Arts (CFA) brought to campus visiting artists who encouraged audience interaction in their live performances. The dance company Scapegoat Garden, directed by Deborah Goffe MA ’19, was among them. The company presented the latest iteration of Goffe’s work “Liturgy|Order|Bridge” last February in three, sold-out CFA Theater performances. “The very first seeds of the project, the first ideas I had, were really about the relationship with an audience — how one cares for an audience,” Goffe said. “Wesleyan is pretty well-practiced at holding things that are not easily categorizable.” In October 2022,…

For each of the last six years, thousands of members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community and supporting allies have descended on Main Street for a day of celebration and community-building at Middletown PrideFEST. Led by Wesleyan’s Office for Equity & Inclusion, University community members and several students from Wesleyan’s Upward Bound program walked in this year’s parade. Wesleyan is a co-founding partner of Middletown Pride, having participated each of the seven years it has run, alongside Russell Library, and the Middlesex County Chamber of Commerce. Middlesex Health has also joined the partnership. This year, more Upward Bound students joined Wesleyan’s march…

The midday sun beamed through barred windows into a high-ceilinged auditorium at Cheshire Correctional Institution as Andrew “Duke” Dickson ’24 donned a red gown and took to a centerstage pulpit. He was moments from receiving the college degrees he’d earned through Wesleyan’s Center for Prison Education in front of an audience that included his mother, son, professors, other incarcerated individuals, and, seated stage right, President Biden’s education secretary. But first, Dickson reflected on the trials, transformation, and good fortune that led to him and the 18 other incarcerated individuals receiving degrees to this day. “It is not that we are…

Wesleyan’s chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society inducted 87 members — 15 from the Fall 2023 semester and 72 from Spring 2024 — into the organization in recognition of their academic excellence and good moral character during Reunion and Commencement Weekend 2024.The inductees join the ranks of more than 50,000 living members of the prestigious organization. Founded in 1776 at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, Phi Beta Kappa is the oldest academic honor society in the United States. To earn induction, students must be nominated by the department of their major, have completed their general…

Wesleyan University’s alumni have made worldly contributions near and far. Whether government officials, physicians, attorneys, schoolteachers, musicians — any career imaginable — the former students who crossed Denison Terrace have made an impact somewhere, somehow. From May 23 to 26, many of them returned to Wesleyan — a place they described as having a transformative effect on their lives — for Reunion. This year, classes of the ’4s and ’9s flocked to Middletown to meet friends old and new. “My four years at Wesleyan were truly a pivotal time in my life. I feel like it really helped expand…

United States Senator John Hickenlooper ’74, MA ’80, Hon. ’10 didn’t set out to become a politician when he graduated from Wesleyan half a century ago. He wanted to be a geologist, but when that didn’t pan out, he found success as an entrepreneur and brewery owner in Denver at the height of the craft brewing craze. When he ran for mayor of Denver at the age of 49, Hickenlooper never anticipated that national politics would play such a huge role in his second act. But after serving as mayor for two terms, he became governor of Colorado for another…

Intergenerational connection in a digitally dependent world was a recurring theme in the Alumni Associations’ Annual Assembly and Meeting held May 25, during Reunion & Commencement Weekend. Sporting special edition Reunion caps and totes along with their own Wesleyan blazers, hats, and gear from years past, alumni and friends listened as Alumni Association Chair Ellen Glazerman ’84, P’26 opened the meeting by announcing the retirement of Wesleyan Fund Volunteer Leadership Committee Chair Suzanne Appell and acknowledging the eldest registered alumnus in attendance (Rev. Boardman Wright Kathan ’51, P’76) as well as the Class of 1974 alums celebrating their 50th Reunion. …

When he came to Wesleyan in the 1970s in pursuit of a science education, Michael Greenberg ’76, P’14, Hon.’24 thought he’d discovered a counterpoint to the large public high school he’d attended in Brooklyn. “That was one of the things that drew me to a small college: that I might get a little more attention,” he said to an audience in Woodhead Lounge at Exley Science Center.” His hunch was correct: with the support of a department that “felt like a family,” Greenberg’s time at Wesleyan set in motion what became his career as one of the world’s most distinguished…

‘Common Moment’ Tradition Connects New Students Across Difference

Welcoming the Class of 2028

Center for the Arts ’24-’25 Season Examines Art as a Way of Knowing the World

Student-Veteran Says Warrior-Scholar Project Changed His View on Education

Performance by Scapegoat Garden at Center for the Arts Influences Student Capstone Project

Wesleyan Staff, Upward Bound Students Join Middletown PrideFEST

At Center for Prison Education Commencement, Enduring Change Through Higher Education

New Phi Beta Kappa Inductees Reflect on Their Accomplishments

Alumni Reflect on Transformative Wesleyan Experience at Reunion

Democracy 2024: Hickenlooper, Roth talk Political Optimism and Opportunity

Intergenerational Connection a Focus at Alumni Association Annual Assembly

Sciences at Wesleyan: An Evolution a Half-Century in the Making