Wesleyan Syndrome
What’s wrong with Wesleyan’s academics and how to really change that

by Brian Edwards-Tiekert


So you made it to Wesleyan. You worked hard in high school, you shopped hard for colleges, and now you've hit your ideal: a place where the academics are strong, the setting is intimate, and campus life is anything but conventional. You picked Wesleyan because it isn't a degree factory like Harvard or Stanford, because it's a small liberal arts school and the teachers know all their students by name, because classes meet around conference tables instead of in lecture halls, because you'll never see a scantron test as long as you stay here.
Well think again.
Actually, you probably already have. Right now, with the Black Drop/Add period over, you've finished what will probably be the most agonizing part of your first semester: course selection. If there's one word that can sum up the freshman course selection experience, it's probably this: disillusionment. Every class that you wanted to take was also the class that everyone else on campus wanted, and had a limit of around 20 people. Left high and dry by the pre-registration process, you began to stalk professors who might just possibly sign a drop/add form to let you into their classes. You left them voice-mail, e-mail, and campus mail. You talked to their secretaries, you left notes taped to the doors of their offices, you might have even caught yourself looking for photographs of the professors in question so that you could accost them if you happened to spot them walking around campus. You worried about the classes you had, worried more about the classes you wanted, and worried even more than that about classes that you might have been missing.
Does it seem like a lot of trouble just to get into a course you're interested that's a reasonable size? It is.
Take first-year classes, for example. First year students at a liberal arts school are supposed to be sampling the range of academic pursuits the school has to offer, yet the way things are set up here, that's nearly impossible. Introductory-level courses in popular areas (English, sociology, women's studies, Spanish, etc.) are some of the hardest courses to get into. They must be listed as first primaries during pre-registration, and even then you aren't always guaranteed a spot. You can't possibly get into more than one of these classes per semester. Other departments, like Psychology, deal with the problem by giving their intro-level classes huge enrollment limits, and students find themselves sitting in a 200-person lecture wondering why they bothered to come to a small liberal arts school. Still more intro-level classes are fairly exclusive permission-of-instructor courses. Any introductory-level fiction-writing course, for example, asks that applicants submit writing samples. On this basis the teacher chooses fifteen students and turns away fifty or more. There's a real irony involved in turning anyone away from an 'introductory' writing course because their writing skills aren't good enough--aren’t those are precisely the skills that the course is supposed to improve?
A lot of students have had different theories on why the system doesn't work too well: the pre-registration process needs to be re-vamped, teachers do too much research and not enough teaching, CSS and COL absorb too many faculty resources, Wesleyan doesn't open multiple sections of popular classes, this department or that department gets too much money; the list goes on and on. The truth is that no matter how poorly organized these things are or aren't, there simply isn't enough to go around. Our student/faculty ratio is more than 20 percent higher than at our 'peer' institutions: no matter how you cut the cake, it still isn't gonna be big enough for the party.
Why?
A number of years ago, having depleted its endowment by trying to expand too fast, the school was faced with an impending financial crisis. The school started cutting down its budget by cutting down on faculty; it even eliminated entire departments (We used to have programs in both Ceramics and Educational Studies). At the same time, it tried to increase alumni donations; this involved opening more positions in alumni recruitment and putting more money into things like well-groomed grounds, glossy school catalogues, and good PR. We've become expert at hiding our weaknesses and touting our strengths in front of incoming students, their parents, and alumni. The result? We've wound up with a school that's much better at selling its image than delivering on what it promises.
Stack Wesleyan up against other small liberal arts schools and it comes off looking pretty shoddy: Compared to places like Vassar, Swarthmore, and Williams, our classes are bigger, our campus is uglier, our financial aid program is underfunded, and Middletown is far from an ideal college-town. So why did you come here? Because Wesleyan knows how to sell itself. In an age where marketing reigns supreme, where presentation has become more important than product, where even venerable old institutions of higher learning hold their breath in anguished anticipation of their yearly ranking in US News and World Report, Wesleyan leads the pack.
We have no qualms about outright deception. The Wesleyan Homepage lists our student/faculty ration as an 'enviably low 11/1.' Enviably Low? Maybe among state universities! That's pretty high for a small liberal arts school of our supposed caliber. Swarthmore has a 9/1 ratio, Haverford has a 9.6/1 ratio, and even Vassar comes in with a 10/1.
The obsession with Wesleyan's image is apparent in everything on campus. It's being incorporated into the language we use when dealing with the university. The Argus' year-end publication last year, which dealt with new policy decisions at Wesleyan, was entitled "How Will Wesleyan Sell Itself?" The same obsession permeates the cheerful, syrupy letters mailed to our parents that shower praise on our extensive dining options, our 'user-friendly' Mac-Grey laundry cards, and our cheap & convenient long distance plan. My parents got a letter that bulletted the advantages of using the AT&T ACUS service: "Low rates mean your student has more money to spend on fun things like pizza and movies!" Ask me to show you a movie theater in Middletown and the best I'll come up with is a liquor store with a marquee. Most importantly, our school's concern with image is coming to frame the debate over major administrative decisions. Last week's Argus carried an article on the decision over buying the Long Lane Property. Bill Holder, the Director of Public Information, was quoted as saying: "I don't think security is the key issue here. As Wesleyan works to market itself, having a juvenile prison next to Wesleyan property would not be helpful." Why buy the land? Not for any specific use, not even because of a potential security risk from the inmates, but because having a juvenile penitentiary next door just might make the school look unappealing.
Our hang-up on appearances goes further than just blinding us to our own deficiencies, it jeopardizes our Academic Mission. By being concerned solely with externals, we come to hold our school to outside standards of quality and worth. Wesleyan abandons the possibility of forming its own vision, creating its own mission as a community. Instead, it cobbles an identity together out of the preconceived notions of prospective students, their parents, wealthy alumni, and US News and World Report as to what makes a good university. Even as our very identity is jeopardized, our ability to create any real change is eroded: hung-up on appearances, Wesleyan can only effect superficial changes.
We've just come to the end of a five-year plan to restore economic stability to the school, and where are we turning our sights now? You certainly won't see a lot of new classes opening up. What you will see is a brand new admissions office built to give interested pre-frosh a better image of the school. We've seen a record-breaking year for alumni donations, yet our financial aid spending remains at a critically low level for a need-blind school. Students have been petitioning for a full-time faculty position in Queer Studies for years. They're still petitioning. Meanwhile, the administration is favorably reviewing a proposed $60-75 million renovation of the campus that nobody asked for. This proposal would 'center' our community through monumental changes like moving the campus center 250 yards across campus and putting a tree-lined pathway behind College Row. While students drive themselves to the brink of sanity trying to get classes, and to the brink of poverty trying to pay for them, the administration has declared an initiative to make Wesleyan more 'user-friendly.' Strangely, 'user-friendly' doesn't include making it easier to get classes or offering better financial aid packages; instead we have 'user friendly' laundry cards, 'user-friendly' card-scanning locks, and a new 'user-friendly' preregistration system that lets you get shut out of the classes you want more conveniently. We're stuck on superficial change.
And what can we do about it? We can organize protests, rallies, and riots; we can have sit-ins, walk-outs, and takeovers; we can write letters, sign petitions, and hold discussions, we can set up tents on the president's lawn and we can firebomb his office, and the entire time we're doing this all the administration has to do is smile, nod, and wait for us to graduate. No, the only way to affect the Machine Wesleyan has become is to attack its image, the only place the Machine can be sensitive. In short: we have to terrorize the tours.
Picture a tour group of unsuspecting pre-frosh being led through the campus. A cheerful, smiling tour guide walks backward in front of the wide-eyed high-schoolers and parents, all clutching red Wesleyan folders full of glossy publicity. As she walks, the guide gestures at the buildings and landmarks around her, distracting her captives with a barrage of statistics, history, cute anecdotes, and entertaining trivia. "That building over there is Eclectic, it was designed by the same man who did the Lincoln Memorial." "Woodrow Wilson lived here when he was a professor at Wesleyan." "When you clap here, it echoes back as an A-Flat! Everybody try it!" Often, she's trying to convince herself of the school's worth as hard as she's trying to convince them: be merciful, she's as much a victim as everyone else. She carefully weaves an invisible wall around her charges so that they can walk through the reality of Wesleyan while completely encased in a bubble comprised of the Myth of Wesleyan. It is our duty to burst that bubble.
The tour guide does a double disservice: the first by deceiving her charges and perhaps making them pick the wrong college, the second by perpetuating the illusion, the smoke screen that keeps all of us trapped. As long as the university can maintain appearances, it has no incentive to spawn real change in its policies.
Most students feel the need to interfere with tours almost instinctively. It's a feeling you get when they walk by, an impulse to shout an epithet from your balcony, to twitch spasmodically as they walk by, to whip out a supersoaker, or to strip naked and run around them. Indeed, such spontaneous acts of terrorism are our patriotic duty.
But we need to go further: We need a concerted, organized anti-misinformation tour terrorism campaign. When popularly supported student initiatives meet resistence from the administration, the first response should be to have people at every tour, walking backward next to the tour guide, dishing out the real story of Wesleyan. We need guerrilla theater: brief skits of students battling with professors to add a class. We need informational packets: "Twelve things you should know before you decide to come to Wesleyan," a small pamphlet with short anecdotes of graduates who sold themselves into slavery to pay off their student loans, a modified course book, essentially the same as the old one, except with a large red slash through every class with a limit of 20 or less.
The only way to force the administration into action is to hold the University's image ransom. After an extremely short period of constant terrorist interference, it should be possible to submit a list of demands to the administration that will be met with all due speed.
There is also a secondary benefit to tour terrorism: It gives the terrorists the chance to affect the applicant pool for incoming students the next year. The administration has always had absolute power over the community of Wesleyan because it can pick and choose the individuals who will make up that community. By directly affecting the applicant pool, we can pre-empt that authority by limiting the administration's options. Some people respond positively to the creativity and brutal honesty of tour terrorism. These are the type of people we want going to Wesleyan. Some will be put off by this type of direct action, and it's best that we warn them off at the outset. It's as simple as that.

In Defense of the Bennet Regime
by Laura Clawson

Brian’s article makes a number of good points about Wesleyan’s problems, especially regarding student-teacher ratios, which are 20% higher here than at most comparable institutions. It should be said, though, that many of the specific policies he criticizes were implemented by the happily-departed Chace administration, and are changing under President Bennet.
It is true that the new Admissions Office is one of the most visible changes since Bennet arrived; however, this is being funded by a donation given for that specific purpose, and other changes, more significant to the average student, are being made. For instance, last year money was allocated for six new faculty positions. Those new faculty should be appearing on campus within the next year or so. Although this alone won’t solve Wesleyan’s problems, it does signal an important change in administration policy on faculty levels. Additionally, the administration is considering the possibility that, as highly-paid older faculty retire, they will be replaced by lower-paid younger faculty, making it possible to maintain a somewhat larger faculty at the same cost.
The major problem with this is that this year’s seniors will not benefit from these changes, and even frosh will probably see only minimal change by the time they graduate. This is truly unfortunate. We should remember, though, that these problems were not created by President Bennet, and that he is acting to solve them. We should also remember that this is an important time in determining the direction the university will take over the coming years.
If there’s something you wish was happening on campus that isn’t, an area of study you want to see better represented in the curriculum (Gay, Lesbian, and Sexuality Studies, for instance), this is a good time to be lobbying for it.