How did we miss this gem!?

I don't know if you've gathered from what I post lately, but I'm doing a ton of research on college admissions for my thesis. Running through some newspaper articles tonight on Factiva, I came across this gem of a piece describing one family's perception of Wesleyan that, while printed over a month ago, is just too hilarious not to post:

By the time we get to Wesleyan, it's so hot that we may as well be in Louisiana, and we're happy to discover that the admissions office offers bottles of chilled water, with its own Wesleyan label.

Not surprisingly, the admissions office, like those of other colleges we've visited, is filled with people who seem, more or less, just like us, trailing kids who seem, more or less, like Sam. There are slightly rumpled couples wearing sandals -- with very little in the way of makeup on the women, lots of Eddie Bauer for the men -- and boys and girls in various stages of nerves and excitement. Everyone radiates a kind of hopeful, earnest sameness.

But we're early -- by almost two hours -- so rather than sit and study the other families, we scoop up our bottles of Wesleyan water and head out for a self-guided tour. This, of course, is different from a guided tour, because on it, you get no facts and figures about small classes, flexible programs of study, cooperative dorm living, sports, modern dance concerts, vegetarian and/or kosher cafeteria alternatives, or chemistry labs. Sam is particularly interested in seeing the library.

"How big is this place, anyway?" he says. "How hard could it be just to find one stupid building?"

"I don't think I even considered applying here," Stuart says.

"My friend Amy went here and loved it," I say. "I remember visiting her once . . ."

"You've told me this story, like, a thousand times before," Sam says.

" . . . and the food was so amazingly good. I'll never forget that."

"Who cares about the food?"

"You will," I tell him. "You'll care about the food."

And so it goes, until we decide, grumpily, if unanimously, to walk down the hill in the direction of Middletown proper for lunch. Where, once again, there are all these people who look like they might live in Berkeley, or the Upper West Side of Manhattan: people in Birkenstocks, the New York Times tucked under their arms; women with big silver jewelry, carrying notebooks and pens; teenagers so tall and good-looking that you wonder if maybe you've seen them before, perhaps in a movie . . .

Sam, picking up on social nuances, is glancing around nervously, and biting his lower lip. Perhaps he's thinking, as I am, that the other kids here, in addition to having a certain quality of East Coast suave that Sam, with his Deep South upbringing, clearly lacks, also have SAT math scores superior to his. Especially the kid whose family, sitting just behind us, is vigorously debating the relative merits of MIT versus Caltech.

--by Jennifer Moses, Washington Post, June 3, 2007

Eclectic Turns 100

The Wesleyan Connection reports:

“Our reputation was one of respect from most everyone,” recalls Bill Moody ’59, P ’91.” We did not come across as rich or preppy or jock-filled or hyper-social or racist or nerdy. We did not dominate a given group or project or sport.”

Moody, author of the recently-published book, A History of the Eclectic Society of Phi Nu Theta, 1837-1970, shared memories with current and past Eclectic members during the 100th anniversary celebration of the completion of the Eclectic Society House May 26. The book is published by Wesleyan University Press.

Faces have come and gone, but the symmetrical brick house with a four-pillar façade at 200 High Street has changed very little.

"This house is truly what links the ever-changing society members," says Eclectic Society member Omar Hunter Craighill '09. “The house has very distinctive architecture and has been a very important part of campus for many generations of students.”

Formally named The Eclectic Society at Phi Nu Theta, the fraternity was established in the 1830s, when students began meeting for the purpose of helping each other with college studies, literary work and Saturday-evening social events. In 1837, the association became official, making it the first fraternity established at Wesleyan.

Now 170 years old, Eclectic is one of the oldest non-national fraternities in the United States. Many notable figures in Wesleyan's history were members of Eclectic, including four who became Wesleyan presidents: Joseph Cummings, Class of 1840; Cyrus D. Foss, Class of 1854; John W. Beach Class of 1845; and Edwin D. Etherington ‘48.

Early Eclectic members gathered in a clubhouse; later they lived in a dormitory-like structure at 246 High Street. In 1900 they began extensive fund-raising for a home of their own, and in 1907, a house was completed. It was designed by Henry Bacon of New York City, who later designed the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. The house had the “largest and finest dance-hall of all the college houses,” wrote Billy North Rice, chairman of the organization’s Board of Directors in 1921.

“This building was the first step towards bringing a highly distinguished American architect to serve as de facto campus planner and architect for Wesleyan,” says Wesleyan Historian David Potts '60, author of Wesleyan University, 1831-1910: Collegiate Enterprise in New England.

Bacon created Wesleyan’s first campus plan in 1913 and was the architect of the swimming pool addition to Fayerweather Gymnasium, the Skull and Serpent building, Van Vleck Observatory, Clark Hall, the Memorial Chapel Renovation of 1916, the South College belfry and the initial design for Olin Library. In 1923, Bacon won the highest award in his profession and Wesleyan’s campus “has by far the largest assemblage of his works, starting with Eclectic,” Potts says.

(more)

Advice for the Incoming President

Professor Claire Potter offers up some great advice for incoming President Michael Roth:

1. Be a walk around manager. Sure, being a President is time consuming. But schedule free time in your week that will allow you to drop in on people, take a stroll around the campus, and go have coffee in the new campus center. Show up where and when you are least expected. Go to talks. Come to the History Department Tea, and Pie Day at American Studies. Go over to Interlibrary Loan and order your own books so that you can say hello to hard-working people who will never be asked to meet you in a more private way. Presidents need a sense of who their constituents are before they come asking for something, or protesting something, or are Tangled Up In (some kind of) Blue.

2. Don’t inject the word “excellence” into everything you say and expect that we know what you are talking about, or that it answers any question about a course of action to be taken. What excellence actually represents is – well, nothing. It’s a buzzword, the verbal equivalent of a Rorschach test. And some of the great disagreements in education and scholarly life today have to do with prioritizing some kinds of knowledge over others and calling it "excellence." Us queer and colored folk, for example, are exhausted by the continual requirement that we exhibit excellence that conventional people can translate into their own, conventional, world view. Look at our diversity as an intellectual institution, figure out where the energy is, and jump on the bandwagon. Find out what Zenith [Wesleyan] does best and do what you can to cultivate what you find. Find out what we don’t do and how it would enhance our life as a thinking community to start doing it.

3. Take a serious look at how large our administration has grown over the last decade, who pays for it, and what justifies it. It is very hard for faculty to understand why we spend every April hiring contingent faculty (fifty or sixty of them across the university) when we seem to add numbers-crunchers, Vice Presidents of This-and-That, and student services workers one after another. If we need all these people, and we don’t need teachers at a university, fine. But someone needs to tell us why. And exactly what our mission is as a liberal arts college if it isn't having enough faculty to have the time and energy to pay attention to students as individuals.

4. Do what you can to stop the griping about Division III athletics and move on to things that really matter. This is not, whatever William Bowen says, a major problem that the liberal arts college must face. Sports are fun, and exercise is good for young adults. Over fifty-percent of the Zenith student body is involved in varsity athletics of some kind, and most of these kids are actually not recruits. For those that are, athletics is actually one of the few ways that working-class kids can still get into Zenith when they didn’t go to such a great public high school (which is, frankly, most public high schools), and in my experience these kids are just as academically capable as the children of celebrities and the wealthy alumni/ae legacies.

5. Start a campus-wide conversation about how much stress and anxiety students cope with, what we are doing as an institution that enhances that stress, and why, as a community, we talk about it as if it has nothing to do with discourses of “excellence” and our pedagogical practices. We wouldn’t need so many elaborate “student services” if students weren’t made so desperate during the college admissions process, and subsequently more desperate as they claw their way through college.

6. Here’s a good place to start addressing faculty stress: the tenure and promotion process at Zenith is a mess and it is taking far too much of our time for no good purpose. When you get to know us better, put together a committee of people *not* drawn from the people who have served on the T & P committee. This committee should hold public hearings, invite people from other universities and the AAUP to consult, and then put together a set of recommendations for university-wide reform of the personnel process. And while you are at it – reform the T & P committee. Many of them are (to be frank once more) zombies. And if they aren’t zombies before they are elected, they often become zombies as a result of their service. This doesn’t seem like a good outcome, and it means many of us who would actually be thoughtful about tenure and promotion would rather eat glass than serve on that committee.

7. Encourage the faculty to form an AAUP chapter. Give one or two members of the faculty a course relief to get it done. An organized faculty is a faculty that knows how to negotiate, cooperate, and adjudicate. And while you are at it -- ask faculty why they don't go to meetings. Figure out how to change that, and what kind of meeting the faculty would agree to go to. It's demoralizing that we don't, and because no one goes, it's as demoralizing to go to faculty meetings as it is to stay home. Kind of like eating in an empty restaurant (which you look too cool to do.)

8. Let the students chalk on the sidewalk. It just really isn’t that important. And the students whose chalkings were originally banned have graduated anyway. I don't think the students we have now even know how to chalk.

9. Make retirement a realistic possibility for faculty who are in their sixties and seventies. Provide incentives that signify how much you value past service and that simplify the lives of senior faculty in ways that enhance their last decade of service and enhance the quality of our community. Get faculty over the age of 67 out of the personnel process and out of governance (except in cases of extraordinary administrative competence), and provide resources for cultivating their teaching and scholarly lives. Very senior members of the faculty who are more concerned about who the next hire is going to be than how they are going to get their last book or two done before they die are not the people you want messing in decisions that affect what Zenith will be twenty years from now. These decisions belong to the younger generations who will live with them and have their careers shaped by them.

10. Zenith has lost much of its uniqueness in its quest for “excellence:” for those of us who have been here a while, sometimes you feel like you could wake up and be anywhere (except Williams. Never Williams.) Remember why you loved it here in the 1970’s, and see if you can’t bring some of that back. A good start would be to withdraw from the U.S. News and World Report College Rankings system.

The Purpose of a Student Blog

Wesleying is an interesting topic for discussion at Wesleyan. From what we can tell from our site stats is that most students read it daily (or some students are reading from six different computers a day which is sort of weird but ok, we'll take it). A lot of faculty and staff are slowly admitting to read it. We can only assume that someone in the administration reads it. I mean, we can assume public relations does--like a hawk.

But most of the success of a blog (any blog) comes from the relationship between blogger and audience. That's the fun part. That's what distinguishes a blog like this from other things we could be doing. It's dynamic. And given this, we can do a lot of things with it.

I'm thrilled at the proliferation of new student blogs like EON's. It's really satisfying watching students find a social medium where limitations are few and the costs are low.

Despite the ubiquity of "the blog" (because god knows everyone has a blog), a lot of people seem to want to relegate "the blog" into something less effectual than it could be. I'm probably more of the mindset to see the blog more than it actually is, admittedly, but at the same time I think it's better to have too much faith than too little, sometimes.

So I'm putting it out there. What do you want Wesleyan's "Blogosphere" to do for you? What can you do for Wesleyan's Blogosphere? What are the stakes in creating a student space that, in many ways, lives and breathes entirely upon student effort. There is no one else to blame if it fails. But what is to gain if it succeeds?

What's your take? What kind of space do you want to build?

Incite in Middletown Press

Speaking of Wesleyan in the media, Middletown Press ran an article today on the editors of Incite Magazine.

Also, there's apparently a new Middletown blog called Right of the Middle which aims to document everything we do at Wesleyan that somehow encroaches on the blogger's sense of morality. That's fun.

More Snow Creatures!

The Wesleyan Connection captured some great daytime shots of this week's snow creations:


"

Index

Ever wonder what those call numbers all over campus are from? It's Index.

Index is a large-scale temporary installation that examines the library’s role as an index to the world outside, focusing on the devise of the call number. The world outside the library is marked in the language of the library: vinyl call numbers are distributed everywhere, stuck onto buildings, automobiles, trees, objects, even people (clothing) throughout the campus, and even into the town of Middletown. The call numbers refer to specific books in the Wesleyan library collection that in some way refer to the site to which they are affixed. A passerby could literally take note of the call number, check the book on the on-line catalog system, and find the book, which would inform them about the site.

Special Collections Blog

Valerie Gillispie, one of Wesleyan's Archivists, just notified us that Olin now has a Special Collections and Archives Blog! If you're interested in old photographs or Wesleyan's history, be sure to check back as they add more stuff!

Campus Tour Cheat Sheet

Presenting: Everything you will ever learn on a campus tour.

This will be on the exam.

Related:

Thus Spake Zuckerberg

From the official Facebook Blog (yeah, there is such a thing)

We’re not oblivious of the Facebook groups popping up about this.... And we agree, stalking isn’t cool; but being able to know what’s going on in your friends’ lives is. This is information people used to dig for on a daily basis, nicely reorganized and summarized so people can learn about the people they care about. You don’t miss the photo album about your friend’s trip to Nepal. Maybe if your friends are all going to a party, you want to know so you can go too. Facebook is about real connections to actual friends, so the stories coming in are of interest to the people receiving them, since they are significant to the person creating them.

We didn’t take away any privacy options. [Your privacy options remain the same.] The privacy rules haven’t changed. None of your information is visible to anyone who couldn’t see it before the changes. If you turned off your wall to non-friends, no one who is not your friend will be able to see a post on your wall. Your friends can still see it; it hasn’t changed. Secret groups and secret events remain secret from other people. Pokes and messages remain as private interactions. Nothing you do is being broadcast; rather, it is being shared with people who care about what you do—your friends.

I agree with his logic. Technically, it's not a breach of trust--you could find out all that information before the change. It's just that people didn't really want to find that information.

So the apparent "privacy" issue isn't what steams me about the new feed. What steams my beans, however, are the following reasons:

• I do not care if Joe John removed Pecker from his favorite movies at 9:59 this morning.

• I do not care if Nick Russell '08 and Sam Grover '08 are no longer in a relationship because they're both straight guys who were never in a relationship with each other to begin with.

• To be bluntly fair, most changes people make to their facebook I do not care about, even the changes made by my closest friends. You see, I actually talk to my friends and find out their interests and relationship status. It's actually how humanity found out most information before the advent of Facebook. I'm sure it'll be how humanity returns to finding out such information after civilization as we know it collapses upon itself (ironically probably because of Facebook).

• Facebook's conquest of the college social sphere in general. It was fun at first, then the novelty wore off pretty quickly. Then they added the photo feature, which was good fun. Then the novelty of that kind of wore off. So Facebook's strategy was to come up with some new feature every couple of months to keep people on their site. Most of the features have been utterly lame and this one just takes the cake, but it's not because of issues of privacy. More probable is that people who added lots of people to their friends' list in the hopes of appearing "popular" are now bombarded with the daily updates of 500 people they don't even know and are kicking themselve in the gullet. That or they're like me and find the feed obnoxiously useless when one still relies on phone calls and face-to-face socialization.
  

Exploring: Hall-Atwater/Shanklin

Hall-Atwater is only two stories high, so the view isn't remarkable.







From the roof you can get into the machine rooms. DON'T ENTER IF YOU HAVE LONG HAIR OR LOOSE CLOTHING. Many of the machines have dangerous exposed, rapidly spinning parts.







Also, the machine room leads to another part of the roof that contains a ladder that will take you to a higher level.


Shanklin is a little different: While it's got more levels than Hall-Atwater, it's not actually possible to be on the "roof" because it's sharply sloped (The posts that look like they could be a balcony are just there for decoration). So don't try it. The view isn't worth it, anyway.







Finally, there's the Hall O'Dead Stuff on the 2nd floor in Shanklin:

You Know You Go To Wesleyan If...

This list was compiled on multiple occasions by the Wesleyan Livejournal Community.

You Know You Go To Wesleyan If...

--When you go to use the bathroom, you don't even look at the sign on the door anymore.
--You have a favorite side in the Argus/Hermes debacle.
--Prometheus ceases to be known as "those kids who spin fire" and begins to be known as "those kids in Alpha Delt".
--You look forward to Wesfest more than you look forward to Christmas.
--You've played the Indie Band Name Game as a get-to-know-each-other during Orientation.
--Catching a glimpse of the black squirrel always brightens up your day.
--Boobies just aren't that shocking anymore.
--In your group of friends, 7 out of 10 are jewish and the other 3 are atheist.
--Along the same note, 7 out of 10 voted for Kerry and the other 3 for Nader.
--You have a Douglas Cannon conspiracy theory.
--Your cell phone contacts list consists mostly of people who own cars.
--You're getting pretty good at understanding the teacher in Peanuts cartoons ("wah wah wah...wuh") thanks to Bennett's mumbling.
--You have no idea who bdolangavitt is, but you'd pledge him your soul in a second anyways.
--You get annoyed when you have a lot of reading to do because it'll cut into your facebook browsing time.
--Since last year, you've developed an embarassing and compulsive addiction to America's Next Top Model.
--Fauver's new car smell is really starting to get to you.
--Anywhere more than a 10 minute walk away is "too far."
--Whenever you go to Weshop, you make sure to wear your winter coat--the bulky one, with the large pockets.
--You've pretended to be a prefrosh in order to get free swag.
--If you're not vegan, you vehemently hate vegans.
--...but you have secretly considered becoming vegan anyways just because of the Vegan Cafe.
--You're surprised when people actually know Wesleyan instead of confusing it for Wellesley.
--When your friends at other school complain about work fucking up their sleep schedules, you stare at them and think, "...sleep schedule?"
--You know what it means to fuck the binary.
--You have a definite preference between Olin and Sci Li.
--The parties you attend are more likely to be broken up by fire alarms than police.
--Everyone you know has taken a course with "Modernism" in the title.
--...Or a course that deals substantially with the identity of a marginalized group in society.
--You don't say you're straight, you just "Havn't found the right girl/guy/other yet."
--When someone asks you about the construction of binary, they are not talking about computer logic.
--Reading the Public Safety reports is more entertaining than the humor/comics section in the school newspaper.
--You've never actually met Evan Carp is, but you hate him anyway.
--You've never actually met Jesse Young, but you know and love him anyway.
--Yellow is officially the color of happiness. Thanks, post office.
--You know all of the Mocon staff by name, and maybe their birthdays.
--Dave the Grill Guy has used your birthday as his lotto numbers.
--You've realized that the key to popularity is owning a small furry animal.
--You can rank the fraternities by sketchiness.
--You STILL can't rank the societies by sketchiness.
--You've either been attacked by a bat or brag to your high school friends about the weekly Argus bat count.
--You justify spending $80+ a week on pot/alcohol because, hey, think of all the money the Network's saved you...
--You've made out with your best friend, your best friend's significant other, your roommate, your prefrosh, your french T.A., and Midge Bennett.
--"Priviledged" is the worst insult you can call someone.
--Jessica Barbarosa has listed you as a friend...
--You've written at least one Wespeak about how great freedom fo fucking speech is because even though we are arguing about actually CONTESTED political issues, we need to be fucking reminded of that every goddamn week.
--You believe in Santa Claus...You've seen him in STlab at least three times.
--For some reason you associate Train's "Drops of Jupiter" with lifting weights.
--You've a living white male, so you only hate 2/3rds of yourself.
--When people talk about liking Bush or disliking women, you can expect that they're kidding.
--...And your expectations will be right.
--You know people so ironic that they're taken seriously.
--You've been taught to revere the late great Bob Cat even though you've never met him.
--Half of the decorations in your room came from IKEA, the other half from the dumpster-diving workshop.
--...And everyone has those damn tibetan prayer flags.
--...And at least one Radiohead poster.
--Living in a house with a porch is as high-class as it gets.
--You have to go see your friends in some performance at least once a weekend.
--You have no real talent in singing/dancing/acting, but you do it in public anyway.
--When you go to the beach and everyone sits facing the ocean, you think, "This is just like Foss Hill...But with an ocean."
--The person that just called you a "fucked-up, classical sexist" is dancing to "Gold Digger" at Eclectic.

Talk the talk

Some of these should be obvious, but I can't sleep, so whatever.

You:
Prefrosh are technically prospective students still in high school (other schools call them Prospies, but don't you fucking dare utter that word here), but some people keep calling students who have already matriculated "prefrosh" until the minute they step onto campus during orientation, whereupon they become freshmen. Additionally, you are forever your host's prefrosh no matter what year you are. No, you will not be hazed.

Academics:
PAC is for history/government/poli-sci majors, Fisk is for most humanities, Judd is where psychology majors live, and the Science Center is for science majors. Hall-Atwater, Shanklin and the Science Tower are all separate entities that are referred to as the Science Center. PAC lab is in PAC, STlab is in the Science Tower, and HASlab is in Hall-Atwater, although no one goes there. Never, ever, ever confuse COL (College of Letters) with CSS (College of Social Studies). The administration is all in North College except for the President, who's in South College. The Bell Tower is in South College, the Clock Tower is in Memorial Chapel.

Living:
In Westco specifically, if you live on the second floor, you live in Up, and if you live on the first floor, you live in Down. For example, Westco 214 would be Down 2; Westco 125 would be Up 1. The Westco Cafe is not a cafe. Fauver is divided into Nearside and Farside. "Butterfields" is almost never said in its entirety; instead, it's Butt A, Butt B, Butt C...etc. Open House is the LGBTetc. safe space, not Out House, which is dedicated to enjoying the outdoors and is still not to be confused with Earth House, that seeks to actively preserve the environment.

Leisure:
Duke Day and the Sex Party are in the fall. Zonker Harris Day and Queer Prom are in the spring. Wesfest, Zonker Harris Day and 4/20 are almost always on the same weekend. A Townie is a Middletown resident unaffiliated with the University, but the word has a somewhat negative connotation. The Tunnels can refer to any part of the tunnel system around campus, but the Maintenance Tunnels can be defined separately.

Food:
Mocon is where most of you will eat on a regular basis; the Mocs is the tummy trouble you experience afterwards (pronounced "moques", but this term is rapidly falling out of use in favor of "shitting my brains out"). At Davenport, if you go to eat at the Campus Center, you're eating on the first floor. If you want the second floor, you eat at Montague's, and if you want First Harvest, you eat at Vegan. If you're going to Late Night, you're going to Summerfields after 9pm. S&C is the Star and Crescent, Red & Black can refer to either the Red & Black cafe in Broad Street Books or who you work for if you get a job soliciting alums for money. If you say you're going to Broad Street, it is assumed that you're going to the book store since there's nothing else of interest there.

Feel free to add to this post.