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Wesleyan University
was founded in 1831 by Methodist leaders and
Middletown citizens. Instruction began with 48
students of varying ages, the president, three
professors, and one tutor; tuition was $36 per year.
Today Wesleyan
offers instruction in 39 departments and 46 major
fields of study and awards the bachelor of arts and
graduate degrees. The master of arts degree and the
doctor of philosophy are regularly awarded in six
fields of study. Students may choose from more than
900 courses each year and may be counted upon to
devise, with the faculty, some 900 individual
tutorials and lessons.
The student body is
made up of approximately 2,700 full-time
undergraduates and 200 graduate students, as well as
more than 400 part-time students in the Graduate
Liberal Studies Program. An ongoing faculty of more
than 300 is joined each semester by a distinguished
group of visiting artists and professors. But
despite Wesleyan’s growth, today’s
student/instructor ratio remains at 9 to 1, and
about two thirds of all courses enroll fewer than 20
students.
Named for John Wesley, the founder of Methodism,
Wesleyan is among the oldest of the numerous
originally Methodist institutions of higher
education in the United States. The Methodist
movement originated in England in the 1720s and was
particularly important for its early emphasis on
social service and education. From its inception,
Wesleyan offered a liberal arts program rather than
theological training. Ties to the Methodist church,
which were particularly strong in the earliest years
and from the 1870s to the 1890s, waxed and waned
throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Wesleyan became fully independent of the Methodist
church in 1937.
Wesleyan’s first
president, Willbur Fisk, a prominent Methodist
educator, set out an enduring theme at his inaugural
address in September 1831. President Fisk stated
that education serves two purposes: “the good of the
individual educated and the good of the world.”
Student and faculty involvement in a wide range of
community-service activities reflected President
Fisk’s goals in the 19th century and continues to do
so today.
Wesleyan has been
known for curricular innovations since its founding.
At a time when classical studies dominated the
American college curriculum, emulating the European
model, President Fisk sought to put modern
languages, literature, and natural sciences on an
equal footing with the classics. When Judd Hall, now
home to the Psychology Department, was built in
1870, it was one of the first American college
buildings designed to be dedicated wholly to
scientific study. Wesleyan faculty’s commitment to
research dates to the 1860s.
The earliest
Wesleyan students were all male, primarily
Methodist, and almost exclusively white. From 1872
to 1912, Wesleyan was a pioneer in the field of
coeducation, admitting a limited number of women to
study and earn degrees alongside the male students.
Coeducation succumbed to the pressure of male
alumni, some of whom believed that it diminished
Wesleyan’s standing in comparison with its academic
peers. In 1911, some of Wesleyan’s alumnae founded
the Connecticut College for Women in New London to
help fill the void left when Wesleyan closed its
doors to women.
Under the leadership of Victor L. Butterfield, who
served as president from 1943 to 1967,
interdisciplinary study flourished. The Center for
Advanced Studies (now the Center for the Humanities)
brought to campus outstanding scholars and public
figures who worked closely with both faculty and
students. The Graduate Liberal Studies Program,
founded in 1953, is the oldest liberal studies
program, and the first grantor of the MALS (master
of liberal studies) and CAS (certificate of advanced
studies) degrees. In this same period, the
undergraduate interdisciplinary programs—the College
of Letters, the College of Social Studies, and the
now-defunct College of Quantitative Studies—were
inaugurated. Wesleyan’s model program in world
music, or ethnomusicology, also dates from this
period. Doctoral programs in the sciences and
ethnomusicology were instituted in the early 1960s.
During the 1960s,
Wesleyan began actively to recruit students of
color. Many Wesleyan faculty, students, and staff
were active in the civil rights movement, and the
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. visited campus
several times. By 1968, women were again admitted as
transfer students. In 1970, the first female
students were admitted to Wesleyan to the freshmen
class since 1909. The return of coeducation heralded
a dramatic expansion in the size of the student
body, and gender parity was achieved very quickly.
Wesleyan’s programs and facilities expanded as well,
and new interdisciplinary centers were developed.
The Center for African American Studies, which grew
out of the African American Institute (founded in
1969), was established in 1974. The Center for the
Arts, home of the University’s visual and
performance arts departments and performance series,
was designed by prominent architects Kevin Roche and
John Dinkeloo and opened in the fall of 1973. The
Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies was
established in 1987. The Center for the Americas,
which combines American studies and Latin American
studies, was inaugurated in 1998. The Center for
Film Studies, withstate-of-the-art projection and
production facilities, opened in 2004.
An addition to the
Freeman Athletic Center opened in 2005 with the
1,200-seat Silloway Gymnasium for basketball and
volleyball, the 7,500-square-foot Andersen Fitness
Center, and the Rosenbaum Squash Center with eight
courts. Fall 2007 marked the opening of the new
Suzanne Lemberg Usdan University Center and the
adjacent renovated Fayerweather building, which
retains the towers of the original Fayerweather
structure as part of its facade. The Usdan Center
overlooks Andrus Field, College Row, and Olin
Library, and houses dining facilities for students
and faculty, seminar and meeting spaces, the
Wesleyan Student Assembly, the post office, and
retail space. Fayerweather building provides common
areas for lectures, recitals, performances, and
other events; it contains a large space on the
second floor, Beckham Hall, named for the late Edgar
Beckham who was dean of the college from 1973–1990.
Michael S. Roth
became Wesleyan’s 16th president at the beginning of
the 2007–08 academic year. At the outset, he began a
process of strategic planning to define the next
phase of curricular and programmatic innovations and
facilities renewal. President Roth has announced
initiatives to substantially increase grant support
for the 41 percent of Wesleyan undergraduates who
receive financial aid and to institute a scholarship
program for veterans of the military. Planning is
underway on campus for the Allbritton Center for the
Study of Public Life, which will link intellectual
work on campus with practical and policy issues
nationally and internationally; the Molecular and
Life Sciences Center for teaching and research; and
the renovation of the Davison Arts Center. |
