Are you Wesleyan?

Do you contemplate infinity

for the fun of it?

Do you have a new favorite book every week?

Do you quote Hume, Hegel, and Homer…

Simpson?

If you were an automobile

would you be a converted hybrid?

Do neuroscience, dance and history

seem like a logical combination?

Do you surf the library?

Do you find patterns in complexity?

Would you stay up all night

to make friends for life?

Do you expect to spend your whole life

learning?

Are you Wesleyan?

—Our new Admissions home page

After seeing this nauseating trivialization of the entire Wesleyan student body on the new Wesleyan.edu, a strange, disorienting feeling overcame me. Walking around campus, I experienced a new tingle of camaraderie and joy with every passing face. I felt one with my fellow students in a way I never have before. “You’re not nearly as much of a cliché as Admissions thinks you are,” I thought, as someone hurried by. “Neither are you!” I thought to another. “Or you, or you, or you!”

The above poetic rendering is probably not what the adults who run this place think of us. At least, I hope not. This is obviously targeted towards high school kids who can’t yet understand what Wesleyan is actually like. So, perhaps it is more offensive to the intelligence of high school kids than it is to us. But I’m not so sure.

I know, for one, that my 17-year-old brother wouldn’t “dig” this. What exactly is the message, here, that Admissions is sending? It’s pretty clear: We’re philosophical, we like to read books, we’re liberal, we’re hip, we’re interdisciplinary, we like to party, we’re dedicated intellectuals.

Sounds pretty good, right? But add all these things together (plus the infuriating tone) and we come off like a bunch of grade A douchebags. Do we contemplate infinity for the fun of it? I mean, maybe, but if I ever contemplate infinity it’s more because I’m afraid of dying than anything else. I guess you could call that fun.

Do we surf the library? Yes, I think we would, if we had any idea what that meant.

Do we find patterns in complexity? Do we quote Hume, Hegel, and Homer…Simpson? Do we rhyme ‘til the end of time? Do we sit in the grass all day, drinking port in the never-ending Middletown sun and expositing on the mysticism of the ancient Pharisees? But are we still oh-so-intellectual yet oh-so-of the proletariat that we deign to quote a cartoon character from the boobtube at the same time?

I heard some people yelling about this at the end of my Jewish History class (which, to me, speaks volumes more about Wesleyan students than any of the above clichés), and an excellent point was raised: the point of Wesleyan, they said, is that everyone is unique and that there is no “typical Wesleyan student.” Yes, everyone here is unique in that hard-to-define Wesleyan-ish way, but this poem more than fails to capture that.

Especially the part about the anthropomorphic hybrids (If you were an automobile would you be a converted hybrid?). The line functions on so many levels beyond environmentalism. It sends the message loud and clear: you should be part of the new cosmopolitan, green, progressive, liberal, eco-consciousness down to your soul if you’re gonna even think about coming here. Now, I’m a liberal and I fully support the environmental movement, but is that really the right message to be sending? That on an issue as politicized as this one—global warming—you must fall on our side, the side of Wesleyan, the home of the cutting edge College of the Environment? Is that sort of line really going to draw in the people from outside of Manhattan, San Francisco, D.C., L.A., and Newton that we should be looking for?

Look, I’m all down for Roth’s new “Effective Idealists” marketing campaign. I think it’s smart, and it acknowledges our long history of having cool, influential, often political, alumni. But this poem, which will undoubtedly be looked at with great interest by thousands and thousands of potential applicants, doesn’t live up to how cool Wesleyan actually is. It just makes us sound like every other “quirky” liberal arts college. And that’s not going to attract as interesting students as we deserve.

About Ezra Silk

I have been interested in journalism ever since I was an editor at my high school student newspaper, where I was involved in a freedom of speech controversy that was covered in the local newspaper as well as local television and radio outlets. The ACLU became involved, and the ensuing negotiations lead to a liberalization of my school's freedom of expression policy. I worked as a summer intern at the Hartford Courant after my freshman year at Wesleyan, reporting for the Avon Bureau under Bill Leukhardt and publishing over 30 stories. At the Argus I have been a news reporter, news assistant editor, news editor, features editor, editor-in-chief, executive editor, blogger, and multimedia director. I have overseen the redesign of wesleyanargus.com, founding the Blargus and initiating ArgusVideo at the beginning of my time as editor-in-chief during the spring of my junior year. During my senior year, I have co-edited the Blargus with Gianna Palmer and founded Argus News Radio, a 15-minute weekly show produced by WESU 88.1 on which I conduct a weekly segment interviewing seniors about their thesis topics. I have written over 70 stories at the Argus and continue to do reporting and blogging as much as I can.