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College
of Social Studies
Newsletter
Table of Contents
Editors Li Yu ’99, Peter Kilby
NEWS FROM THE 4TH FLOOR
The College continues to move in
its accustomed orbit. Our aim remains to admit 30 Sophomores each year and,
with normal attrition, expect to graduate about 25 Seniors. In the last three
years the graduating number has been above the mean (22, 28, 31) although our
current Junior class of 16 is an example of the down-side dip that occurs every
six-to-seven years. Happily, the reputation of the CSS among Wesleyan students
has never been higher. We have just accepted next year’s class from a pool of
61 applicants, a number only surpassed once in the past fifty years.
What can we say about the students
themselves? As to gender, females are no longer a minority – they constitute an
even half. Students of color (all varieties) are about 40 percent. Their
extramural activities range from WSA, the Argus and debating to crew, soccer,
the Entrepreneur Society and Model UN. Regarding their quality, it’s as good as
ever –or should I say the CSS social and intellectual chemistry continues to
work its magic! Despite the absence of Sophomore grades, we manage to hold our
own in the competition for Phi Beta Kappa, and we continue to out-perform in the
domain of University Honors and post-graduate fellowships
Among our tutors, alumni from
every class since 1966 will see at least one familiar name. Here is the list
for the past several years: Beginning with economists, there is Richie
Adelstein, John Bonin, Joyce Jacobsen, Peter Kilby, Tanya Rosenblat and Gil
Skillman. From Government we have Guilio Gallarotti, Don Moon, Peter Rutland,
Ernesto Verdeja and Sarah Wiliarty. Of the historians we find Rick Elphick,
Erik Grimmer-Solem, William Johnston, and Cecilia Miller. From Philosophy,
Brian Fay and Joe Rouse. David Titus and David Morgan were teaching in the
program up until several years ago. Dean of the Social Sciences, Don Moon, in
an essay nearby, reflects on the changing profile of faculty that Wesleyan
recruits and their fit with the CSS curriculum.
The running of the College with a
rotating leadership and rotating faculty is not a simple matter. And here the
Administrative Assistant, the sole unmoving point, plays a key role. Madeleine
Howenstine will soon complete her third year in this position. In her we have
found everything we could have wished for. Adept with the computer and on the
internet, she navigates Wesleyan’s complex budget accounts with ease.
Maintaining student records, ordering furniture and journals, taking minutes at
meetings, coordinating external examiners –all carried out with competence.
Monday lunches, Friday social hours, banquets, holiday parties and receptions
are planned and supervised by her. Her warm and outgoing personality is
appreciated by all. In every dimension, she is a fitting successor to Anne
Crescimanno and Fran Warren.
Some recent developments
We continue to review our curriculum in the
ever-evolving academic enterprise. Writing, argumentation, analysis remain
constant but intellectual perspectives change. While the domain of the Junior
and Senior year is, as before, the post-World War II global stage, we have made
a slight shift in the Senior Colloquium from “Democracy and Democratization” to
the more inclusive “Political Economy” perspective. In preparation for our
deliberations we prepared an inventory of all the curricula taught in the
College over the past fifteen years, alongside the student evaluations of each
of these 130-odd offerings. As we go forward it is most helpful to have a full
understanding of where we have come from and what has worked and what has worked
less well.
A longstanding CSS issue has been
the employment of quantitative methods in our curriculum. Other than database
retrieval and graphical analysis of some thirty time-series variables for
Nigeria and Taiwan in the Junior Economics tutorial, there has been little
direct work with numbers. Perhaps a third of our students take a statistics
course, often in connection with a second major. As an experiment to serve some
of those other two-thirds, especially as they contemplate their thesis research,
we offered this spring semester a half-credit Pass/Fail course (CSS 301) in the
bare-bones of regression analysis. Ten juniors signed up. It was a success,
and will be offered again next Spring.
Dick Miller, recently retired from
the Economics Department, was the instructor in that course. And, with notable
generosity, he took the remuneration he received from the CSS Endowment Fund
and did something we should have done a long time ago. He endowed a two hundred
dollar annual Joan Miller Prize for the “Best CSS Honors Thesis”. The
first winner is Raffi Stern who employed modern social theory to parse the
conflict between free interaction of individuals attempting to satisfy their own
interests found in The Wealth of Nations and the psychology of sympathy
for one’s fellow man of The Theory of Moral Sentiments which results a
willingness to give up one’s own particular desires for the good of the
community. And a second endowed prize is in the works for the best
interdisciplinary thesis, owing to the benevolence of Dan Prieto ’91.
In the Fall of this year the
Co-Chairs held extended discussions with the new President, wherein we were
graciously given ample time to present our views about the critical needs of the
College. Cecilia Miller and Peter Kilby were joined by Peter Rutland –this trio
representing the College leadership for the last four years—in documenting the
case for several internal appointments, or, at a minimum, joint appointments.
Because the Departments have their
own staffing imperatives, individuals most suited to our curriculum are not
always available. In recent years untenured faculty in Economics and Government
have been advised by their Chairs not to teach in the CSS prior to obtaining
tenure. This means we may have to turn to moonlighters. Fortunately not this
year, but for the past three years (and next year) we have had to rely on at
least one outside visitor. Because CSS is no one’s home Department, attendance
at tutors’ meeting does not match comparable attendance elsewhere.
Catch-as-catch-can appointment of Co-Chairs –occasionally only a sole Chair when
no other is available—means a less than optimal leadership in terms of planning
and continuity. As a Department without appointments, we have but slight clout
in university decision-making.
While a very successful major, for
reasons of faculty motivation and coherence the CSS does not achieve its full
potential. Whatever the contrary considerations to our arguments might have
been in President Roth’s mind, they prevailed. The borrowed-faculty model for
the CSS Department is to continue.
Alumni and the Endowment
Fund
Your fellow alumni and alumnae
continue to make their way in the world. Lawyers, school teachers and money
managers to one side, the CSS persists in supplying 3 of the 30 Wesleyan
trustees, in Athenahealth we have our first one-billion-dollar IPO, and –while a
number of CSSers hold chairs in U.S. universities—at Columbia such a chairholder
is also the institution’s Academic Vice President.
Beyond boosterism, and more
critical to the health of the College, alumni now play a significant role in
what we do. For example, a major ingredient in the success of the
re-introduction of External Examiners eight years ago has been the participation
of a number of our own academics as Examiners. Steve Sheffrin, Roberta Adams,
Maggie McConnell, Ray Koslowski, David Fagelson, Diego Von Vacano, Stephen Engel
and Jerome Copulsky have brought their affective knowledge of how the process
works and of the avoidable pitfalls (into which we occasionally fell in the
1960s and 1970s). And alums have provided many of our best Banquet speakers.
David Garrow, Matt Rees, Paul Halliday, Peter Arenella, Andrew Kleinfeld, Robert
Hunter, Dan Prieto and Charles Bosk spring to mind. And those of you who have
talked at the Monday luncheon are legion.
Before turning to financial
matters, mention should be made of those activists organizing local CSS alumni
social events in their home areas. Here we note Jan deWilde, Ben Magarik,
Estrella Lopez, and Ben Oppenhiem. In addition to the Alumni Association
convenors treated in our last Newsletter, John Driscoll, Mich Marinello and Ben
Magarik have invested considerable time and energy in fund raising efforts.
As you all will recall from
President Roth’s letter in the Fall, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha made a magnificent
gift to the university of $2.5 million for a Chair in Social Studies. While the
funds went to the University, the Chair designation adds to the visibility of
the College. It has been awarded to Don Moon, long-time tutor and frequent
Co-chair. A more recent gift of $250,000 from Robert Coleman ’68 does, by
contrast, provide resources that strengthen the College. In this contribution
to the CSS Endowment Fund, Bob joins Donald Zilkha in the “Trustee Associates”
category, Diana Farrell (and her husband, Scott Pearson) in the “President’s
Circle” and Tom Kelly and Tom Mattlack in the “Founders Club.” Of the third of
CSS alums who so far have contributed, the generosity of these five donors has
provided sixty percent of the 1.2 million we now have. While most can not
manage such lofty levels, a doubling of the participation rate to 67% would most
certainly carry us to our permitted maximum of $2.0 million.
Launched in 2002, the purpose of
the fund is to enhance the faculty strength of the CSS. Several of its five
specific objectives are aimed at making the College a more attractive place for
faculty from the associated Departments to teach in. We do this by providing an
automatic research grant of $1,000 per year to every serving tutor, by providing
$3,000 grants for syllabus preparation that is uniquely tied to our curriculum
and by providing funds to support interdisciplinary team-taught colloquia on
current or special topics that lie outside the established curriculum. There is
also provision to bring in for a semester or a year distinguished visitors whose
current teaching or research closely matches the intellectual pursuits of the
College. A final use of endowment income is to provide bridge financing in order
to relieve a stressed situation. We may soon be doing this for a European
historian whose slot might not otherwise be filled for two or three years.
A fully funded Endowment provides
us with the means to strengthen our major in these important ways. It is a sign
to the Wesleyan community and beyond of the esteem in which our alumni hold the
program that formed them many years ago. And, by indirection it affords us a
little more voice, a bit more weight in the arena of University decision
making. “Wesleyan University for the CSS Fund” is a cause worth supporting.
PK
******
Since our last Newsletter two of
our beloved colleagues have passed away. Jeff Butler (who died but three weeks
ago) joined the College in 1964 and retired in 1991. David Titus came two years
later and he retired in 2003. Below are excerpts from remarks delivered at
their respective Memorial Services by Rick Elphick and Peter
Kilby.
Jeffrey Butler
(1922-2008)
Jeff was an old-school-tie type of
guy. He was passionately loyal to Wesleyan, much as it often irritated him; to
the History Department, and to the College of Social Studies. He was loyal to
his wife and children and to his students. He was faithful to his colleagues,
especially to his junior colleagues. In my early years at Wesleyan, I could not
have had a better mentor. He guided me through the political minefields of
Wesleyan and South African studies, critiqued my prose by writing his trademark
“ugh!” in the margins, and gave me personal and financial advice that I vividly
remember and am grateful for to this present day.
Jeff remained faithful to his
siblings 7000 miles away in South Africa. He loved to mix his personal and the
professional life and eagerly shared his spirited, cultured South African family
with his North American colleagues. I was honored get to know three of his
siblings—Dorothy, Joan, and Guy--, though they lived in different parts of South
Africa, and though, as a rather tongue-tied Canadian, I was a bit intimidated by
their wit and unable to keep pace with their rapid dialogue.
Jeff was faithful to Cradock, the
dusty town of his childhood. Founded in 1811 as a frontier outpost between white
settlers and African chiefdoms, Cradock had a population of around 6800 when
Jeff was born there in 1922. Its segregated population consisted of Africans,
Coloureds (people of mixed race), a few Asians, and the politically and
economically dominant whites--themselves severely divided by ethnicity, by
language, and increasingly by politics: the English vs. the Afrikaners.
Jeff was faithful to the
memory of the generations that preceded him—to his grand-parents, parents,
uncle, and aunt. And to the liberal politics his family espoused—a faint but
inextinguishable tradition of decency that runs through South African history.
In the last third of his life,
Jeff returned to Cradock, dedicating himself to writing a social history of the
town based on meticulous and exhaustive archival research.
He set out, on the one hand, to
show the normalcy of Cradock, whose town fathers boosted it as an “up-to-date”
town. Like towns in farming communities anywhere, in the 1920s it acquired
roads, hospitals, running water, and electricity. Jeff became interested in
toilets and sewers. When historians boasted of writing the history of ordinary
people—which they called history from the bottom up--he claimed to be the only
one writing history from the bottom down.
But Cradock was not a farming town
in Saskatchewan, Iowa, or New South Wales. It was embedded in what Alan Drury
long ago labeled a “very strange society,” one with breathtaking inequalities
and a rigid racial hierarchy that few whites in Cradock considered in any way
troubling or abnormal. Jeff sought to show how even the most routine and
pedestrian step in the development of the town was shaped and misshaped by the
doctrine of segregation, and then how, after 1948, a new national government
inflicted on Cradock the even more rigorous agenda of social engineering known
as apartheid.
The Butlers of Cradock were
dedicated Quakers, almost the only ones in town. Jeff would reject his family’s
pacifism when he went off enthusiastically to fight the fascists in North Africa
and Italy; and (as many of you will remember) with equal exuberance he rejected
the teetotalism of his father, uncle, and aunt. Yet he was deeply respectful of
the decency of his forebears, their commitment to the uplift of the unfortunate,
and their allegiance to the Cape liberal tradition, which affirmed the right of
all races to vote subject to the same qualifications. By the 1970s and 1980s,
South African liberals were regularly excoriated by academics. Their resistance
to segregation and apartheid had proved worse than useless, and their black
allies, the products of missionary schools, had been superseded by far more
radical leaders.
In 1986 Jeff and I, along with
David Welsh of the University of Cape Town convened a conference in South Africa
on South African liberalism. The country was in a state of widespread
insurrection, only partially suppressed by the government. From the University
of Cape Town each day we saw smoke rising from communities torched by government
security forces; black radicals were taking refuge in the homes of their white
liberal friends; and just before our conference convened, the government imposed
a state of emergency. The Cape Times, the liberal paper of which one of
our conferees was an associate editor, had been printing daily pictures of
atrocities committed by the authorities in black townships. Suddenly on the
first morning of the state of emergency it devoted its front page to the marital
problems of a Hollywood starlet.
In this intense crisis--and with
Colin Campbell, Wesleyan’s president, in attendance--some of the finest South
African liberal minds presented papers that Wesleyan Press would later publish
as Democratic Liberalism in South Africa: Its History and Prospect. Three
years later the Berlin Wall was demolished; three months after that, Nelson
Mandela was released after 27 years in prison. Soviet communism and South
African apartheid collapsed almost in tandem and with a rapidity predicted by no
one; and the Soviet collapse had much indirect influence on South African
events. A multiracial South Africa emerged in the 1990s with a markedly liberal
constitution and under a government guardedly friendly to free markets. Next to
the joy of seeing apartheid buried, this fact gave Jeff the greatest
satisfaction.
In the 1980s
and 1990s, Jeff published a number of articles and presented numerous seminar
papers on Cradock to deeply appreciative audiences. His book was almost finished
when he suffered a stroke. A number of his friends, including his daughter Katy
and others present today, have been editing, checking footnotes, and preparing
the manuscript for publication. The task, I am confident, will be completed in
2008--too late for Jeff to see it, but not too late for us to derive
satisfaction from our task. It is an important book, one which no one of my
generation, or in subsequent generations, could ever write. Publishing it will
be a fitting way for us to honor a man who was faithful in so much, and to so
many, and for us to be faithful in return.
Rick
Elphick
******
David Titus
(1934-2006)
David moved into the
office just across the hall from mine in September 1966. He was replacing
Richard Merlman as CSS Govern-ment tutor for the Sophomores. I was the
Economics tutor for the Juniors. Like most of us back then, he came to
Wesleyan “all-but-dissertation”. With a substantially unfamiliar curriculum to
teach and a thesis to complete, we flew by the seat of our pants. Because
teaching evaluations had not yet been introduced, we managed to squeak by those
early years largely undetected.
David took longer than most of us to complete the dissertation –three years—but
when he did, Palace and Politics in Pre-War Japan was a home run,
published by Columbia University Press in the Ansley Prize series.
And for a number of years in the 1970s, he was the Deputy Chair of the Columbia
Seminar on Modern Japan. As opposed to the rigorous behavioralism then espoused
by the Wesleyan Government Department, David insisted that the functioning of
Government, in its means and in its ends, could not be properly understood
without close attention to cultural values and historical context. He brought
this perspective to the Sophomore tutorial “The Rise of the Western Nation
State” and especially to the Senior Colloquium “Democracy and Democratization
since 1945” – a colloquium that treated the experience of such countries as
China, India, Korea, Poland and Argentina.
David was deeply
committed to the CSS as an institution. He loved the tutorial mode of teaching
and the kind of intellectual formation that was achieved by its graduates. For
a certain type of student, the very best education imaginable. And David
savored being part of the intense intellectual and social chemistry that goes
into the process. He would often say something to the effect “Can you believe
it, I get to teach in these tutorials, and I even get paid for doing it.”
We have already
heard of David’s willingness to subordinate his interest, his own personal
progress, to a variety of collective enterprises which he esteemed. So it was
here. The CSS exacts a considerable price. On the one hand the College
operates wholly on borrowed faculty; on the other, it is extremely
labor-intensive. Quite apart from the extensive work with individual students, a
major campaign is required to recruit an incoming Sophomore class. Even more
strenuous is the effort to recruit next year’s tutors from four, sometimes
reluctant, Departments. A complex mechanism of written and oral external exams
must be arranged each Spring.
The CSS
program is also fragile. It is fragile in the sense that repeated short-falls
in recruiting a full entering class or being forced to turn to moonlighting
graduate students to serve as tutors would spell the end of the program. The
pivotal actors in executing all the administrative procedures and in averting
these fatal twins are the Co-Chairs. In a Department that is home to no one, no
one wants to serve as its administrator. Every year is a struggle. One of a
very small group who have volunteered for this critical function, David Titus
stepped up to the plate ten times between 1973 and 2000.
There is much
more to be said about David’s contributions to the CSS. The most notable is the
attention that he gave to individual students. Others will speak to that
shortly.
In an era
when his peers became increasingly self-monitoring and inclined to define their
rights and duties with ever more precision, David answered with his spontaneity,
his over-flowing goodwill, his candor and his immoderation. The lore of Japan,
the birds, the violin, the poetry, the joie de vivre brought a measure of gaiety
into our lives, David Titus’ passing can only be seen as a unique subtraction
from our institution. The ladder was taken up after him. He will not be
replaced.
Peter Kilby
******
Allison
Guinness, President of the Mattabeseck Audubon Society, writing in “Wingbeat”,
the newsletter of the Mattabeseck Audubon Society:
What can I say
about David Titus? Anything I could put in this small space just would not be
enough to praise and thank David for all he has been to me and Mattabeseck
Audubon. Without David, there would not be a MAS. He was the instigator of it
all, and the glue that held it together. He knew birds like no one else, but it
was just the miraculous way he could spot them, hear them, call them in, it was
the way he got all of us hooked on birds and Mattabeseck. Who else could get a
huge group of people together to go out in a blizzard or the bitter cold or a
driving rainstorm all day shortly before Christmas instead of shopping – and
leave every minute of it. David called the Christmas Count “the annual
frostbite fellowship.” He would gather us all together for the tally like a
parent bird with its brood as we excitedly awaited the results of the day’s
quest.
David also
helped Mattabeseck become a strong defender of the environment and promoter of
wise development, leading the charge to protect Deadmans Swamp in Cromwell, one
of his favorite places. David was the driving force in Mattabeseck’s
acquisitions and preservation of sensitive areas in Wangunk Meadows in Portland.
We wish him
well on the ultimate journey to the birds of
paradise.
From Mark
Wallach, ’71:
When I was on
campus last May for my 35th reunion, I was able to visit David at his
nursing home, where we had a somewhat choppy but still warm conversation. It
was only weeks before he died. David and I had been close since my
undergraduate days, and I always made it a point to visit him when on campus.
Both of my children are Wesleyan alums, and my son (Philip ’05) was also in CSS.
David was indulgent and helpful to both of them during their careers at
Wesleyan. He was one of the intellectually alive and personally warm people I
have ever known, if also flagrantly self-destructive, shockingly opinionated,
and unable to resist taking cheap shots at people who got his goat. I miss him
greatly.
From Rick
Davidman, ’84:
With no
disrespect to Morgan, Fay, Adelstein, et al,, David Titus was CSS during
my years there and the program took on his personality. He was consistently
enthusiastic, supportive and approachable. David always made feel like there
was nowhere else he’d rather be than CSS, except perhaps birding. On a personal
level, he kept from being tossed out of CSS during my sophomore year after
agreeing with my argument that a bell-shaped curve needed a left-hand side –
thereby allowing me to stay on “double-secret” probation thereafter. I will
always be thankful for that second chance and proud that he didn’t regret his
decision.
From Andrea
Ring Grodberg, ’95:
I decided to
become a CSS major after taking David Titus’s Japanese Film and Society class
when I was a mere freshman. Nothing felt cooler than sitting in one those tiny,
dark CFA screening rooms, watching deeply existential Japanese films from the
sixties, and listening afterwards to Titus’s impassioned descriptions how and
why the films were brilliant.
Of course the
CSS served me well, but that Japanese film class, and the delicious sake that
sometimes accompanied it, is what truly made a lasting impact.
From Stacia
Friedman-Hill, ’85 (9/11/06):
I was saddened
to hear about David Titus’ passing and also have many fond memories of CSS
tutorials and Beer & Bull sessions.
One of my
memories of Professor Titus occurred at the end of my sophomore year. We were
interviewing prospective CSSers for the next sophomore class. One candidate had
very lackluster grades and there were rumors of an “attitude problem”. From my
diligent perspective, this seemed like an easy rule-out. During the interview,
Titus cut straight to the point: “Look,” he told the candidate, “This is a very
competitive, demanding program. Frankly, your freshman grades are horrendous and
you appear to be quite lazy. Why would you even bother to apply to CSS?” The
candidate acknowledged his shortcomings, but then made a passionate appeal for
why he wanted to become part of CSS. Titus gave him a chance and the student was
a fine member of the class of ‘86. More than once when I have been hiring
research assistants, I’ve picked the passionate, intellectually curious
B-average candidate instead of the polite, but passionless, straight-A student.
I didn’t
pursue a traditional path when I left Wesleyan and CSS: Instead of working in
government, law, or business, I got my doctorate in neuroscience. Over the
years, I’ve wondered if the tutors would have thought their efforts went to
waste. But more recently, I’ve come to appreciate how all that training in
critical thinking and writing helped me as a scientist. And the Models of Man
and epistemology seminars provided the initial sparks for my interest in how
behavior and mental states are correlated with brain activations.
******
Those First Years Out
Since I remember the CSS class of
2003 as particularly close during our undergraduate days, it would seem only
natural that we would continue to keep in touch post-commencement. But I think
it especially remarkable that beyond our own valuable individual friendships, we
as a class maintain a certain degree of cohesion, now even 3 years past
graduation. We have kept regular contact over a “reply-all” email listserve
that sees its most action around events such as tsunamis, presidential
elections, weddings, hurricanes, and New Years. Our class is especially unique
in its ability to stay in touch, and I think that this is a direct result of our
being abroad during the fall of 2001. During this confusing time, we used CSS
email correspondence as a legitimate way to make sense of the events of
September 11th. I know I found solace in having 29 peers who could
help me process, both intellectually and emotionally, such serious events,
particularly from a location remote from the US. Thus from this unsettling
orientation point, we trained ourselves to stay in contact over email, and
happily, it translated well to our post-graduation worlds.
Graduating from college can be a dizzying and
disorienting affair. Paying off loans, finding a job, staying in touch with
friends, dealing with the mundane, like grocery shopping, to the
extreme—evacuating a country suddenly embroiled in a revolution—all require
skills and evoke emotions that few were prepared for. From my own experience as
one, post-graduates are curiously unstable and confused creatures. Even after
securing a job, apartment, healthcare, and financial solvency, the more abstract
worries settle in: “Who am I? What do I do every day? Where am I going in
life?” While this is unforgivingly trite, these feelings of uncertainty are
very real experiences: one of my CSS peers wrote recently that he felt that
after graduation he was drifting, and was tired of “waking up with nothing much
to do.” During this itinerant and also confusing time, it has been comforting
to correspond with my CSS peers, and to watch them chronicle their quests to
find lives that suit them best and that replicate the passion, enthusiasm, and
sense of purpose we had at Wesleyan, and certainly as CSSers.
Fortunately, many of my peers
sound like they have starts of passionate careers and life experiences. They
have already lived abroad in Georgia, France, India, Germany, Burma, Thailand,
Taiwan, Peru, Mexico, El Salvador, and Tokyo (and I am sure I am missing many
other countries). They have worked in areas ranging from politics and the Peace
Corps to research, education, and journalism. Our class also cannot seem to shy
away from more education, though as one of my peers wrote, it has been difficult
finding graduate school programs that “live up to the passion, dedication, and
brilliance that defines CSSers.” Nevertheless, we have enrolled in graduate
programs for law, economics, philosophy, public policy, urban planning, global
history, and medicine (this list is probably incomplete).
We are now beginning our “fifth
year out” from graduation. Certain memories of Wesleyan are fading (some, of
course, like what we did to celebrate our completion of Comps are fading faster
than others) and our lives are filled with current hopes and struggles and new
weekly readings and assignments. It is my hope, however, that we as CSSers can
remember the importance of being colorful and contentious in our intellectual
arguments as well as remain excited and in touch with each other about our lives
and goals.
Sophie Woolston ‘03
******
Reflections of a Dean
I came to Wesleyan in the fall of
1970, as the sophomore government tutor. I have been teaching in the CSS more or
less continuously ever since, making me one of the longest serving tutors
currently active in the program, second only (I think) to Peter Kilby. During
the past decade or two, I have mainly served as the sophomore colloquium tutor
and as chair or co-chair, though a few years ago I had one of the most wonderful
and memorable experiences of my life teaching a fabulous group of CSS seniors in
the “junior” colloquium, which they had to take as seniors since they had missed
it because they were studying abroad in the fall of their junior year. All in
all, I have been engaged with every aspect of the program for a very long time.
In the fall of 2005 I became Dean of the Social
Sciences and Interdisciplinary Programs, and so came to have yet another
relationship to the College. I am still very much involved in the College,
having taught the sophomore colloquium in the fall, directing two CSS senior
essays and a CSS senior thesis, and serving as an academic advisor in the CSS.
But now I work with all of the social science departments and most of the
interdisciplinary programs to ensure that they have the resources they need to
meet their goals, and to support new ideas and initiatives in these areas. From
that perspective, the CSS looks even stronger than it does from the inside.
You all know that increasing specialization has
marked the academy for the past 150 or 200 years, accelerating every year. Not
so long ago (until 1969), Wesleyan had something of a core curriculum,
representing the faculty’s view of what an educated person should know, what
literature he (and I use that term advisedly) should have read, what ideas he
should be conversant with. That world passed away 40 years ago. Today it is
difficult (though by no means impossible) to find the broad survey courses that
were the core of a liberal education in the past. And, not surprisingly, many
people – both alumni and faculty – have come to fear that a program like the CSS
could not survive. New faculty were being trained to be specialists, focusing on
ever narrower questions, and graduate programs of study became increasingly
narrowed, dropping requirements that PhD students master foreign languages and
complete minors in other academic disciplines. In this climate, they asked,
where can we find people with the broad training and interdisciplinary interests
that the CSS represents?
The good news is that growing specialization
has been tempered by growing interdisciplinarity. Young faculty recognize that
some of the most promising areas of research lie along disciplinary boundaries,
and they have cultivated those areas. As a result, collaborative research and
teaching have grown partly in response to increasing levels of specialization.
And the CSS has flourished. Younger faculty who might initially have been
reluctant to teach in the CSS have consistently found it to be enormously
rewarding and stimulating. Part of the reason for that is the different
relationship we have to our students, especially in the sophomore year, in which
we serve as their teachers and do not give them grades. Part of the reason is
that CSS students have taken a common curriculum, and so we can know and build
on their earlier experiences, developing courses that are more challenging and
stimulating. And part of the reason is that the CSS provides a setting in which
faculty and students are encouraged to look at questions from a variety of
disciplinary perspectives, and employ a wide range of methodologies, so it is
intellectually exciting to participate in the program.
All in all, I think we can say that not only is
the future of the CSS secure, but that it continues to be one of Wesleyan’s
jewels.
Don Moon
*****
The Next Edition
Robert Gelardi has
graciously volunteered to serve as the Editor for next year’s Newsletter. He
succeeds Guy Baehr ’68, Ruth Jaffe ’83, Jeremy Sacks ‘91 and Li Yu ’99.
Soliciting contributions and then obtaining the finished product is not, it
turns out, a slam-dunk. Bob has agreed to take up the task if we accept his
ingenious proposal that we shift to a regime where each issue has its own
editor, spreading the burden and maximizing the enthusiasm.
It is fitting that Bob, a
member of the College’s first graduating class in 1962, has chosen “Our Golden
Anniversary: The First 50 Years” as the focus for his issue. Needless to say,
next year is the fiftieth anniversary of our founding. He would like to
commission an essay by a graduate from each of those decades reflecting on their
perspective on the world they entered and the part their CSS education played in
the world they entered and in their ongoing lives.
If you are willing to
explore this possibility, please email Bob at:
Bgelardi@kellencompany.com
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