A rabble-rouser remembers Wesleyan

The grapes of dissent are always fermenting at Wesleyan University, where demonstrations are referred to by their vintage years and authority figures tend to live in fear of being trampled by the student masses.

You could almost miss that on a tour by some students, who talk about how Wesleyan dovetails perfectly into its host city, Middletown, and how the school attracts some of the best minds in their respective fields to be teacher-scholars. While that may be true, it is not what makes the school unique.

In my freshman year, the only way I could fill my aging hippie parents' shoes was to occupy the administration building with 500 other undergraduates, chanting slogans of solidarity with the oppressed people of the world to defend the university's policy of need-blind admissions.

Though Mom and Dad were still disappointed that I wasn't arrested in the fray, the school's president acquiesced to our demands, admitting that economic justice was more morally defensible than long-term fiscal balance. His loss of face was our empowerment.

Wesleyan is small and elite -- it has only 2,800 students, for whom a liberal arts education will cost more than $100,000 in four years. But compared with the other Little Three colleges, Amherst and Williams, Wesleyan is more iconoclastic, artsy and liberal.

It is said that everyone at Wesleyan has space to explore her or his identity. There is a support group and special interest house for homosexuals, women, racial minorities and even non-Christians -- dubbed Heathen House. The only groups that are consistently dumped on by other students are the four all-male fraternities. The 1994 film "P.C.U.," written and directed by Wesleyan graduates, pokes fun at this liberal homogeny. A review in the Argus, the student newspaper, gave "P.C.U." one star.

But Wesleyan is not entirely about proletarian revolution. Many alumni hail from a different era -- before the '60s, before coeducation, before Wesleyan was called Diversity University.

Their Wesleyan paid homage to the traditional red brick-and-marble columned buildings on the highest hill in Middletown, overlooking the Connecticut River.

U.S. News and World Report consistently ranks Wesleyan among the top 10 small liberal arts colleges, an honor that tends to be self-fulfilling. A few of my 2,800 classmates managed to get a good education there. One won a Fulbright, and she will spend next year teaching in France. Another, no less bookish, is aimless and temping in Manhattan, but glad he went to Wesleyan.

He was also glad to get back to civilization. Middletown is not a college town: no movie theater, funky knickknack shops or Ben & Jerry's. Wesleyan is the cultural center of Middletown, holding Javanese Gamelan concerts, plays, lectures and some open parties. "Without Wesleyan," a sociology professor once told me, "Middletown would be Meriden."

Michael Stoll graduated from Wesleyan University in 1995 with a degree in government and Latin American studies. He was a rabble-rouser and editor of the student newspaper, The Argus. He is a correspondent for The Courant's Middletown bureau. You can share your image of Wesleyan with him at mstoll@csource.com