Wesleyan Students Add New Clubs to Their Bag

By Adam Liebowitz
Contributing Writer

A barrage of chalkings, flyers and bulletin broadcast reviews will be hitting Wesleyan soon. Fifteen new clubs gained recognition from the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) this year, and each organization is eager to share its viewpoints with the rest of the community.

Roger Smith ’01 started WesUnity to link Wesleyan student groups with like-minded campus groups from separate schools and other organizations from outside the University.

"Activists don’t seem to work together well. WesUnity maintains contacts with their national counterparts, who keep us current about the issues," Smith said.

The idea to start WesUnity originated last March as a response to WesLead, a WSA run conference for club leaders to share strategies. WesUnity was supposed to be a branch of the old Student Group Action Alliance, which collapsed last semester.

To take advantage of WesUnity, a students are expected to contact the organization and get networked to other clubs, then join the related group at Wesleyan and maintain the network. An ideal situation would be to have at least one or two people who have used WesUnity in each club.

So far, WesUnity has worked extensively with the Wesleyan Animal Rights Network, linking it with groups at MIT and UMASS, New England Anti-Vivisection, national group Progressive Animal Welfare Society, and international group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Smith hopes to focus on the environmental group E3 this year, as WesUnity has already corresponded with Public Interest Research Group and the Student Environmental Action Coalition, and has a member in each of E3’s national issues subcommittee.

The Coalition for Human Rights was established to facilitate communication between groups with related interests and "increase the mood of activism on campus," said Chris Varmus ’99, founder of the group.

People or clubs who advocate human rights, such as Amnesty International and Police Accountability, can contact the Coalition, which hopes to bring all of the groups together.

The Coalition held its first event Monday, and its plans will culminate in December with a celebration of the hip hop community. The celebration will feature breakdancers, rappers, and graffiti artists.

Elsewhere on campus a different type of music will be heard from another new group, the Gracenotes. A co-ed Christian a cappella group, the Gracenotes have been around for two years but just recently gained recognition from the WSA. They currently have 15 members and practice twice a week.

"We are singing for a purpose, not just to sing," said Ja Kyung Han ’00, leader of the group. "[We sing] about Christ, love, and to praise God ...it is a great way to minister and evangelize to the campus."

This year the Gracenotes sang at religious functions as well as at frosh orientation and will perform during family weekend. The Gracenotes hopes to bring in other groups to sing in larger numbers, and the group hopes to visit other campuses as well. The group will perform at meetings and functions of the Inter varsity Christian Fellowship, a group which shares many of its members with the Gracenotes.

The Gracenotes strive to be a resource for Christian students. Han hopes "to sing frequently enough that it doesn’t always have to be formal like a concert."

Other new groups that are trying to get students’ attention are Poison Ivy, the group responsible for all the anti-Independent Ivy slogan stickers, Pain Resource Network, the Yoga Club, Student Prison Action Net, and the Fly Fishing Group. Most years, six or seven groups enter Wesleyan’s extra-curricular forum, but the 15 groups this year show a newfound initiative among students.