Wesleyan in the News: July 2026
President Michael S. Roth ’78 and Professor of the Practice in Academic Writing Lauren Silber joined The San Francisco Standard for a podcast interview on how artificial intelligence will affect the future of higher education and liberal arts education. Roth’s interview was also released as a question-and-answer story. “I think AI is a threat to how human beings are going to relate to each other in general,” Roth said. “Graham Burnett, a Princeton professor, talks about ‘AI as human fracking’ as the acceleration of the demise of the human features of being human. You replace inconsistent, inefficient human contact with more efficient, more glib, more pleasant, in some ways, interaction with bots. I think AI is a real threat insofar as people fall in love with a lack of friction. What AI can’t do is provide the embodied learning that takes place on a college campus.”
Roth’s most recent book, The Student: A Short History, was featured in a Christianity Today story highlighting three books on the history of education. “Roth’s work raises thought-provoking questions for Christian higher education,” said writer John Fea.
PIE News highlighted Wesleyan’s African Scholars and Freeman Asian Scholars programs in a story on international student scholarships. “[International students] make it possible for all students, especially those from the United States who don’t study abroad, to engage with other cultures without leaving campus,” said Amin Abdul-Malik Gonzalez, vice president and dean of Admission and Financial Aid.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, assistant professor in the College of Social Studies and history, and a co-host interviewed Joseph Slaughter, associate professor of history and religion, on why so many evangelicals support President Donald Trump for an episode of Commonweal Magazine’s Of the World podcast.
Elan Abrell, assistant professor of Science and Technology Studies, wrote about labeling animals as “pests” for a piece in The Conversation. “Labeling an animal a pest typically justifies the use of harmful or deadly methods to remove undesirable species from human spaces. But these methods can lead to costs that far outweigh their benefits, causing unnecessary suffering for not only the so-called pests, but also for humans, other animals and entire ecosystems.”
The fourth season of The Critic and Her Publics—a New York Review of Books podcast hosted by Merve Emre, Shapiro-Silverberg University Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism and Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism—began on July 14 with an interview of Chana Joffe-Walt of This American Life. This season centers around “The Art of the Interview,” a series of conversations exploring the skill of interviewing.
Andrew Curran, William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities, wrote about a rising trend of fusing church and state throughout the country for CT Insider. President Thomas Jefferson was a staunch advocate for keeping church and state separate, Curran writes. “Jefferson had spent much of his political life attempting to keep the church out of the new country's political airs,” Curran said. “Now, 200 years after his death at Monticello on July 4, 1826, the country Jefferson helped found is seemingly doing the exact opposite, fusing religion with the nation's political identity.”
Curran also wrote about the concept of race as a social and historical construct in Valor Econômico, a Brazilian newspaper.
Tushar Irani, professor of philosophy, appeared on WNPR’s The Colin McEnroe Show to discuss the search for immortality and its place in ancient stories. “I think in Greek culture generally it's worth distinguishing between two questions,” Irani said. “There's the first question about whether or not it is a good thing to survive death… And then the second question is, whether or not the soul, or the human soul in particular, is immortal. And both those questions get a lot of sustained treatment in the Greek world even before philosophy.”
Robert Patricelli ’61, P’88, ’90 will receive the 2026 George Bahamonde Lifetime Achievement Award from United Way and FOX61 at the upcoming ImpaCT Awards.
Ian Cooke, an incarcerated student through the Center for Prison Education’s program at Cheshire Correctional Institution, wrote a piece for CT Mirror on the notion of rehabilitation in state prisons. Cooke was part of an initiative to seek a new housing unit focused on rehabilitation, which was approved alongside a prison reform bill in 2022.
