Are hipsters and hippies mutually exclusive on a university campus? Why can’t activism be squeezed into skinny jeans or created through post modern dance? Mere life at Wesleyan has given Gawker enough ammunition for yet another anti-Wesleyan post. This time Gawker has its claws in Barry Chernoff’s innovative first year initiative “Feet to the Fire: The Art and Science of Climate Change,” a class that attempts to look at one of the biggest crises facing our generation through an interdisciplinary lens. Non-conventional may be the most modest of ways to describe this course, but it makes us proud to be going to a school that encourages us to dance our way towards a cleaner world. In the same month, the Wall Street Journal has jumped on the use-Wesleyan-as-an-example-of-the-supposed-downfall-of-liberal-arts-education bandwagon to also critique the specificity of university course offerings.
What does a liberal arts education mean anymore? Is going to college all about producing practical end products, or is there something to be gained by taking classes like “Chicana Lesbian Literature: Speaking In Tongues” that challenge the normative Western cannon of education? Who is to say that identity politics aren’t as valid a field of study as traditional Western literature?
Part of Michael Roth’s message since he came to Wesleyan, reiterated at his inauguration this past weekend, has been the need to create more interdisciplinary courses that allow students to take what they learn in the classroom and apply it to solving problems in the real world. Life does not come in one major at a time. In an age when liberal arts graduates may not be able to balance their check book, at least they can imaginatively and progressively think about the changing face of America, the crises facing our country domestically and internationally, and the ways in which we can enrich our lives every day.
Before Gawker uses this editorial as more fodder to the fire of anti-Wesleyan postings, we challenge them to critically think about what a college education really means these days. If Gawker and the Wall Street Journal have a problem with us trying to create positive change in the world through unconventional mediums, than that is fine by us. There’s no such thing as bad publicity.
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