Wesleyan in the News: April 2026
President Michael S. Roth ’78 appeared on MeidasTouch’s Katie Phang to discuss Wesleyan’s effort to encourage civic engagement among college students throughout the summer and fall leading up to the midterm elections. “We want to educate voters and we want to give them the confidence to participate in the system, whatever their political preferences,” Roth said.
Roth spoke about the state of higher education at Ideastream Public Media’s The City Club Forum in Cleveland, Ohio on April 10. “Government intrusion is now dampening free speech on campus in the name of free speech—that’s what’s so strange about it,” Roth said. “…right now, at colleges and universities across the country, there’s this fear of speaking out because the government might not like what you say.”
Roth wrote about the celebration of Passover and Wesleyan’s efforts to promote student participation in democracy this summer in a piece for The Forward. “When we do contribute, we are participating in history, learning about ourselves and the world around us,” Roth wrote.
Roth was interviewed by The New York Times after the Trump administration filed a new lawsuit against Harvard University, the latest in a yearlong pressure campaign on institutions of higher education under the guise of combatting antisemitism. “It’s just obvious to Jewish Americans and others that this is not about protecting Jews,” said Roth. “This is about attacking institutions with which the president has a beef.”
Roth also appeared on Connecticut Public's The Wheelhouse to discuss how colleges and universities are prioritizing equity and access in education in an age when the Supreme Court says race cannot factor into the admissions decision-making process.
WNPR published a story on a project to turn the former Manresa Island power plant in Norwalk into a public park. Courtney Fullilove, professor of history, and her students recently toured the island since they are putting together an archive about the island’s history, called The Manresa Island History Project. Since it’s decommissioned the plant is now quiet, but it was once a bustling enterprise. “It’s hard to imagine now, but when this plant was running, it would have been deafening,” Fullilove said.
For The Conversation, Ioana Emy Matesan, associate professor of government and expert in Middle East politics, wrote about the strategic difficulties the United States faces in coming to a lasting deal with Iran following a recent short-term ceasefire agreement. “While it is difficult to predict whether the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran will hold or how events will unfold, the dynamics of the conflict so far reveal multiple vulnerabilities in the short term and numerous detrimental effects on the region in the medium to long term,” Matesan wrote.
Peter Rutland, Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor in Global Issues and Democratic Thought, spoke with Asahi Shimbun in Japan for a story on how frequently President Donald Trump’s name and likeness are placed on public property. Rutland called it a “very new phenomenon” for politicians to do this, but it is not just for vanity’s sake. He said self-promotion generates support and he is concerned that “image-making and policy justify each other.”
Lin-Manuel Miranda ’02, Hon.’15 will direct a film adaptation of “Otcet,” an a capella musical that explores internet addiction, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The film's cast will include Amanda Seyfried, Rachel Zegler, Tramell Tillman, Jonathan Groff, and Sheryl Lee Ralph, among others, according to Variety. “I haven’t stopped thinking about Octet since I saw Annie Tippe’s premiere production in November of 2019. Dave Malloy’s score is versatile, brilliant and grows more relevant with each passing year. It won’t leave me alone so here we are,” Miranda said.
BroadwayWorld interviewed musical theater orchestrator and arranger Bill Sherman ’02 about his work, training, and the score of Safety Not Guaranteed, a new musical at Signature Theatre in New York City. “Orchestrating gives you the ability to manipulate all the different sounds and dimensions that contribute to the overall sound of the piece,” Sherman said. “It’s not just about the piano or the voice or the bass. What interests me most about orchestrating is finding a way for all the instruments and voices to co-exist while also contributing to the overall tone and dynamic of the music.”
Shakur Collins ’26 attended the 15th annual National Conference on Higher Education in Prison in Cleveland and spoke with WYSU about the difficulties of reintegrating back into society after being released from incarceration. "When you come home, you have to worry about how do I feed myself, how do I clothe myself, and how do I get housing?" Collins said.
Scholar and writer Mara Naaman ’96 did a question-and-answer interview with Business Matters on studying Cairo, her career, and a success-driven mindset. “I think the language of success, efficiency, and outcomes can be limiting,” Naaman said. “It pushes people to focus on results and self-optimization rather than process. For me, the process is where learning happens. It’s where growth happens. If we lose that, we lose something important.”
Other headlines
Dean of Social Sciences and Professor of Religion Mary-Jane Rubenstein appeared on WNPR’s Where We Live to discuss the ways philosophy and religion intertwine with humanity’s exploration of the moon. “What has troubled me over the last decade or so as I've come to learn what some of our nations and corporations are up to in outer space, is that increasingly it's harder and harder to think of the moon as something different, as something else, as something outside the fray of human events,” Rubenstein said. “Now we're turning our economic efforts toward it.”
Khalilah Brown-Dean, Rob Rosenthal Distinguished Professor of Civic Engagement and executive director of the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, received the Gracie Award from The Alliance for Women in Media Foundation for hosting WNPR’s Disrupted, according to NPR. The award honors “individual achievement and exemplary programming created by, for, and about women” on media platforms. This is Brown-Dean’s second Gracie Award.
William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities Andrew Curran appeared at Harvard University’s bookstore to discuss how the idea of race as a biological category was developed during the Enlightenment, a topic explored in his new book Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race. C-SPAN 2’s BOOKtv showed a recording of the appearance. “I believe wholeheartedly that the story of race, the history of race, remains one of the great untold stories of our time,” Curran said. “It's an untold story because it's very hard to talk about. When you talk about race, you necessarily have to conjure up some of the worst things people say about each other and we don't do that anymore.”
Ahmed Badr, director of the Patricelli Center for Entrepreneurship and assistant professor of the practice in public policy, appeared on a panel at Stanford University’s Institute of Advancing Just Societies. Before the panel, he sat down with Zócalo Public Square for a question-and-answer session on being on family, comedy, social media, and a video he did with actor Ben Stiller making shawarma.
Rutland was interviewed by The World for a story on how the war in Ukraine has impacted the Russian economy. He said military spending by the Russian government stimulated the nation’s economy and created jobs. However, as their cash reserves have dwindled, so has the economy’s growth. “Living standards were going up, wages were going up,” Ruland said, “but in the past year or so, we've seen that eroding, and the government is running out of money.”
Visiting Professor of Government Rudabeh Shahid wrote about Bangladesh’s election on Feb. 12 and the differing ways the results have been interpreted in two Indian states, Assam and West Bengal, for E-International Relations. “Bangladesh’s electoral result isn’t just being reported in India; it’s being actively manufactured into electoral ammunition, and that process tells us something important about how entangled foreign electoral outcomes and domestic communal politics have become in the borderland states,” Shahid wrote.
Shannon Sampieri ’23, an alumnus of the Center for Prison Education’s program at York Correctional Institute, testified at a public hearing in support of a proposal that would eliminate life sentences for people under the age of 25 and create new rules around parole eligibility for young people in Connecticut. The Connecticut Mirror spoke with Sampieri about the hearing. “To lock children up and think that we can never change, I think, goes against what we as society should stand for when we say, ‘It takes a village’ or, ‘No child should be left behind,’” she said.
Syed Noorweez ’29 wrote an opinion piece for CT News Junkie about a town hearing in Brookfield, Connecticut on whether to allow a fossil fuel company to double the capacity of its compressor station. He said about 50 community members spoke during the hearing, many in opposition to the change. “Growing up in a time where climate protections are fiercely disputed, it is easy to be discouraged by what seems to be a constant stream of bad news,” Noorweez wrote. “This hearing was a critical reminder of the strength of community in uncertain times.”
