Wednesday, July 30, 2025



Unwelcome back for students

Once again, I find myself completely confused. Returning to Wesleyan my third time has been an unpleasant reminder of the essential lack of consideration that Wesleyan University seems to have for its own students.

I returned to a wonderful senior house (luckily they still have some of these), which my landlord (Wesleyan) appears to have not in fact readied for occupation. The sink was clogged, both of my doors were broken, the lights are messed up, the drawers in the kitchen are broken, the bathroom floods, and the internet router was fucked. I investigated further and found that this experience was far from unique and special…many people on returning discovered various levels of problems with their housing (if they had housing at all). I know that there are many places to check, but for the entire summer we have been gone, and making sure that all the rooms were their requisite colors cannot have occupied ALL of the maintenance time. The growing pains from the rapid alteration of housing configurations fall squarely on the heads of students.

Now witness the new constructions, five year plans, grand bombasts, which have yet to secure adequate classes for many people (I have been lucky in this regard). The religion and history departments seem stripped of their faculty. Many professors have taken much-deserved sabbaticals, but interim professors seem not to have been hired. I would, as a student, have rather seen the money allocated for the new (necessary?) campus center go to strengthening academic departments, paying teachers better, and growing our campus intellectually, rather than architecturally.

Furthermore, why start classes the day after a long weekend? Almost none of the computer labs and North College offices were open for most of the three days preceding classes, greatly inconveniencing returning students, decision, as far as I can tell, that was not made by somebody who thought for more than ten seconds about what might be nice and useful for students on their return. And I am yet to be convinced that hiring new sub-deans and deepening the Wesleyan bureaucracy (already mind-numbingly large and complex for a school this size) will prevent this from happening again.

These are some small examples I have encountered in my life that might lead me to think that our school really does not account for its students when it makes decisions. I am quite curious whether others have found this, and what their experiences of return have been. A friend of mine proposed that this indifference might be because individual students are a transient population, a problem to be dealt with by the bureaucracy, whereas “The University,” that grand idea, is a long-term thing that hopefully makes people some money. I hope that this cynical view is not the truth, but I have increasingly come to suspect that it is.

Please do not take this as a blanket criticism, but rather an observation and an opinion. Fortunately, this school still continues to be a wonderful and amazing place, despite the concerted efforts of a minority to convince me that it’s not.

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