Lauren RubensteinMarketWatch columnist Howard Gold turned to Professor of Economics Richard Grossman for his take on reforming the Fed. Gold took issue with calls from presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul and others to "audit the Fed," but instead advocated for term limits for Fed chair-persons and changes in the pivotal Federal Reserve Bank of New York. On the matter of term limits for the Fed chair, Grossman spoke of former chairman Alan Greenspan, who stuck around nearly 19 years. (more…)
#THISISWHY Lily Herman '16, co-founder of The Prospect website on college admissions and college life, has been named one of Glamour magazine's Top 10 College Women of 2015. Herman, of Jacksonville, Fla., told Glamour that while her mom helped her to choose the right school, many first-generation and international students don't have the same resources. (more…)
Psyche Loui, assistant professor of psychology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, discussed the phenomenon of tone-deafness on Radio Health Journal. Millions people go through life thinking they're hopelessly tone-deaf when they are not--they can distinguish between correct and incorrect notes, yet they're just unable to sing them properly. Ironically, those who are truly tone-deaf cannot hear such distinctions, and thus may be unaware of their condition. "You'll see some people who don't really know that they're tone-deaf," said Loui. Identifying tone-deafness can be done by having people listen to, rather than sing, music. Many people who are tone-deaf don't enjoy music. "Some people think it all sounds the same,…
Professor of Theater Ron Jenkins wrote in The Jakarta Post about recent performances of Rateb Meuseukat, a form of Acehnese dance from Indonesia, at Wesleyan and a few other New England colleges, which gave American audiences "an eye-opening introduction to an aspect of the Muslim world that is rarely seen in the West." The group "Tari Aceh" performed at Wesleyan's Crowell Concert Hall on Feb. 27. The day after the performance, some audience members returned for a workshop in which they learned how to do the movements they had seen onstage. Jenkins writes: Images of Muslim women in Western media often focus on the restrictive nature of…
Bryan Stascavage '18On March 12, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) aired an episode of The Nature of Things called "Safe Haven for Chimps" in which host David Suzuki and his crew follow the efforts of the staff at Chimp Haven in Louisiana. The compound is a place where chimps, who have been used in biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), are retired and allowed to live our their lives in a sanctuary. Lori Gruen, chair and professor of philosophy, professor of environmental studies, professor of feminist gender and sexuality studies, first appears about 10 minutes into the episode. She speaks about…
Gina Athena Ulysse, associate professor of anthropology, wrote a tribute on the Tikkun Daily Blog to Karen McCarthy Brown, professor emerita of anthropology and sociology of religion at Drew University, who passed away earlier this month. "Reading Karen’s Mama Lola kept me in grad school. Vodou got a human face from her," Ulysses posted on Facebook after hearing news of Brown's death. She goes on to explain, "Mama Lola was published by the University of California Press in 1991. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted over a decade, Brown became an initiate of her subject, as a condition to deeper research and writing…
The Jewish Daily Forward has published an in-depth interview with Assistant Professor of Art Sasha Rudensky '01. The conversation ranges from her immigration to the U.S. from Moscow at age 9 to her start as an artist to her latest photography project, Eastern Eve. Hannah Rubin '13, a former student of Rudensky, wrote the story as part of a larger series she's working on that spotlights Jewish female artists. Rubin describes Rudensky's work: "She uses her photography as a means of personally investigating the contradictions and continuities of contemporary Russian culture. Though her work defies being labeled as 'feminine,' it culls from a sensibility that is distinctly gentle and yet…
Kari Weil, the University Professor of Letters, was a guest on WNPR's "The Faith Middleton Show" to discuss how our evolving understanding of animals should affect how we treat them personally and professionally. They began by discussing the announcement that Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey would stop using elephants in their circus performances within three years. "I think there is a fine line between use and abuse," said Weil."I don't think all use is abuse. I think animals depend on us, we depend on them. We can use certain animals for certain things, but when we're down to exploitive techniques like bull hooks…
President Michael Roth reviewed The End of College by Kevin Carey for The Atlantic. Though it might be tempting to dismiss the book as just another doomsday declaration about higher education, writes Roth, Carey's "call for more accessible student-centered universities is a powerful response to some of the real problems that beset these institutions today." Carey visits a handful of colleges and universities, including some--Harvard, Stanford, MIT--that admit fewer than 10 percent of applicants. "This dynamic of exclusivity is, Carey contends, about to change. Big time," writes Roth. Carey signs up for an online biology class from MIT, and proudly reports his test scores.…
Lori Gruen, professor and chair of philosophy, writes in Al Jazeera about the announcement this month by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey that it would phase out the use of elephants in circus shows by 2018 in response to a "mood shift among our consumers." Gruen explores how this public change in attitudes came to be. She credits, in part, "the tireless animal activists who appear regularly, rain or shine, to protest when the circus comes to town." These activists highlight the cruel and unhealthy living conditions imposed upon the elephants, such as having their legs chained, lacking adequate exercise, and withstanding…
Writing in Tikkun Magazine, government major Rachel Unger '15 offers a first-hand account of Israeli-Palestinian relations she witnessed during her two trips to the region, and how these experiences shaped her views of a "two-state solution" to the ongoing conflict. Unger describes watching "religious Jews marching through the Muslim quarter of the Old City celebrating the 'reunification' of Jerusalem while the authorities blocked Palestinians from the streets with barricades and prevented an old man from taking the bus to his home. I witnessed police knocking a Palestinian man to the ground while hordes of young Yeshiva boys cheered and sang 'Am Yisrael Chai!'" She…
Lori Gruen, professor and chair of philosophy, discussed her new book, Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals, with University of Colorado Professor Emeritus Mark Bekoff in The Huffington Post. Bekoff calls the book "a wonderful addition to a growing literature in the transdisciplinary field called anthrozoology, the study of human-animal relationships." Gruen defines "entangled empathy" as "a process whereby we first acknowledge that we are already in relationships with all sorts of other animals (humans and non-humans) and these relationships are, for the most part, not very good ones. We then work to figure out how to make them better and that…