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Excerpt from #236, Emily Dickinson’s poem-letter to Susan Huntington Dickinson, early October 1883 Dear Sue — A Promise is firmer than a Hope, although it does not hold so much— Hope never knew Horizon When Dickinson wrote these lines in 1883 to her friend and future sister-in-law, Susan, she likely never envisioned that they would be published and pored over by scholars and fans nearly 150 years later, including readers in China. This letter is part of a collection of poems and letters titled Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Soon, Chinese readers will have…

New research from Assistant Professor of Government Alyx Mark and Tiger Bjornlund ’24 shows that courts with publicly financed elections are viewed as more legitimate and less susceptible to donor influence than those that are selected through privately financed campaigns. The paper, titled “Public Campaign Financing’s Effects on Judicial Legitimacy : Evidence From a Survey Experiment,” was published May 30 in the journal Research and Politics. “There is so much focus on the U.S. Supreme Court, but there are entire other levels of courts that receive less attention that have an impact on our day to day lives,” Mark said. In Spring…

Strawberry soda and red velvet cake. They are two foods rich in flavor and in history tied to the celebration of Juneteenth—their red color represents the blood spilled by the last enslaved people freed more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. They are also the theme of Wesleyan’s table at Middletown’s third-annual Liberation Day Festival and first Juneteenth Parade on June 19 celebrating the hallmark occasion. One year after establishing Juneteenth as a campus-wide holiday, Wesleyan is excited to have been a sponsor of the event and have representatives walking in the parade—which will start on North Main St.…

Wesleyan University’s campus sustainability efforts have been awarded Gold status by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability In Higher Education’s Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (AASHE STARS), a self-reporting framework for colleges and universities to measure their sustainability performance. Wesleyan had been at a silver status since first tracking its sustainability performance in 2013. However, there had been incremental improvement at the end of each three-year tracking cycle. Jen Kleindienst, Wesleyan’s sustainability director, attributed the leap to Gold status to the University’s Sustainability and Environmental Justice Pedagogical Initiative, a concerted effort to seed these topics in all aspects…

Wesleyan welcomed to campus 14 veterans and active-duty military members, including one incoming student, for a week-long educational bootcamp with the Warrior-Scholar Project from June 4 to 9. "Recognizing WSP’s impressive impact and how veterans enrich our dynamically diverse educational community, Wesleyan was eager to both become a WSP partner and host a STEM bootcamp on campus," Amin Abdul-Malik Gonzalez, Vice President & Dean of Admission and Financial Aid, said. The Warrior-Scholar Project places former and current U.S. military in intensive classes for one to two weeks for them to begin to re-acclimate to a classroom setting. They offer sessions…

A day of celebration, demonstration, and love. Middletown Pride hit the heart of the city on June 3, as locals and not-so-locals joined together in support of love, equity, and inclusion. Wesleyan was one of four partner organizations of the Middletown Pride event, alongside the City of Middletown, Middlesex County Chamber of Commerce, and Russell Library. Andrew White, Caleb T. Winchester University Librarian at Olin Library, said that he has been attending Pride events since the 1980s and has been involved in Middletown Pride since the first event. He said it marks Middletown and Connecticut as communities striving to “be…

Alumni from years ending in 3 and 8 gathered on Wesleyan's campus in Middletown from May 25 to 27 for the annual Reunion celebration at Reunion & Commencement Weekend. From WESeminars to the annual Alumni Assembly to a picnic on Foss Hill, the Wesleyan alumni community was on full display.

Wesleyan’s Alumni Association gathered in Memorial Chapel for its annual meeting on May 27, electing new officers and honoring some of the University’s most influential graduates. The event began with remarks from Alumni Chair David Hill ’86, who welcomed alumni back to their alma mater for Reunion Weekend and took a moment to acknowledge David Knapp ’49, the eldest registered alumnus in attendance. Three incoming Alumni Association officers were approved by the assembly for the 2023 slate: Ellen Glazerman ’84 P’26; Melvin Acevedo ’99; and Key Session ’17. “As we ask these volunteers to step into their leadership roles, I…

On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence—a document written by a group of five men. Five months later, five different people gathered at the College of William & Mary to form Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest academic honor society in the United States. Now 246 years later, 93 new and current members from Wesleyan’s student body—78 nominated from the spring semester and 15 inducted last fall—packed into the Memorial Chapel on May 27 to be inducted into the honor society. They join an estimated total of over 500,000 living members. Throughout Phi Beta Kappa’s history,…

President Michael S. Roth ’78 wrote a review of an anthology of the late Hayden White’s works titled The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998-2007 for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Roth said White “was a consistently intelligent and engaging postmodern advocate for thinking about history as a form of imaginative reconstruction that could either constrain people or inspire their liberation.” Roth also penned an op-ed in The Boston Globe drawing parallels between education and democracy. “We must be on our guard against those who are afraid of that exploration; we must stand up against…

In the last semester of the 1960s—a decade that’s since become a shorthand for a longer era of social, political, and cultural change—385 undergraduates comprising the Class of 1973 matriculated into Wesleyan. Among them were 50 Black and Latinx students, more than double the number of students of color admitted to comparable institutions. Months later in a January 1970 cover story, the New York Times Sunday Magazine chronicled the University’s strides in those early years of affirmative action in higher education with what some say was an undue dose of derision. “We, the Black, white, Latino, Asian, and women alums,…

There are many common threads among Helen Poulos’ 2023 publications—exploring how the world heals itself from climate change, noting how fire can be a cleansing and rejuvenating tool in the environment, and predicting which plants will thrive in the Anthropocene. “What I am really trying to understand is how climate change and wildfire is changing our landscapes. Because of fuel buildup in forests from decades of federal fire suppression and the hotter and dryer conditions caused by climate change we are seeing all of these big wildfire events across the West in recent years,” Poulos said. Another important commonality is…

Going to China with Emily Dickinson and Wesleyan University Press

Publicly Financed Judicial Elections Viewed as More Legitimate, New Paper Says

Wesleyan Sponsors First Juneteenth Parade in Middletown

Wesleyan University Awarded Gold Status for Sustainability

Warrior-Scholar Project Session Hosted at Wesleyan

Wesleyan Partners, Walks with Middletown Pride

Gallery: Alumni Celebrate Annual Reunion

Alumni Honored for Distinguished Achievements, Outstanding Service at Annual Meeting

Students Inducted Into Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society

Wesleyan in the News: June 2023

In “Two Nations Now One,” the Class of ’73 Reflects on a Pivotal Era for Wesleyan

Research Leads to Student Connection