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Wednesday March 4th, 2026

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wesleyan.argus

Wesleyan University's official student newspaper since 1868 and the oldest twice-weekly college paper in the country.

It’s no secret that university admissions offices

It’s no secret that university admissions offices are high-pressure environments, tasked with the profound responsibility of shaping their school’s future community. Faced with ever-increasing applications and demand to deliver quality candidates and low acceptance rates, staff turnover is a familiar problem for offices across the nation.

The University’s Office of Admission (Admissions) has been no stranger to this trend. 47 admissions deans worked in the office between 2015 and 2025, and 36 of them left in the same time period, according to an independent analysis of Admissions data.

The resignations reached a climax in July 2025, when six admissions deans left the office in the span of two weeks.

Former staff said the reasons behind the recent departures went far beyond the profession’s usual revolving door. In conversation with The Argus, former Admissions employees alleged a long-term pattern of strained leadership practices, inappropriate workplace rhetoric, and unaddressed internal conflicts that exceeded the usual stresses of the workplace and contributed to the 2025 departures.

A significant number of the former employees’ complaints were directed at Assistant Vice President and Director of Admission Chandra Joos deKoven. Multiple former deans reported that deKoven made inappropriately personal, mocking, and racist comments to office employees on multiple occasions. A vast majority said that the office’s day-to-day functions were hampered by pervasive communication problems.

Read The Argus’ investigative reporting and more from our News section at the link in our bio.

Story by Miles Pinsof-Berlowitz & Leo Bader, Executive Editor & Senior Staff Writer
Photo by Finn Feldman

If you are a University student, you may have gott

If you are a University student, you may have gotten an Instagram follow request from @wescam2026 earlier this semester. In the account’s bio is a link to WeScam, a website featuring a countdown to 7 p.m. on Sunday, Mar. 22, the last day of Spring Break. So who or what is behind this mysterious WeScam?

In the late ’90s, before the dawn of Tinder, Hinge, and sliding into someone’s DMs, University students had WeScam. WeScam was a class project turned yearly tradition that automated the age-old question: “So…are you into me?” While originally stylized as WeScam, the website has been referred to as wescam, Wescam, and WesCam throughout the years.

Read about the long history of WeScam and more from our Features section at the link in our bio.

Story by Lyah Muktavaram, Senior Staff Writer
Photo illustration by Aarushi Bahadur

Flashing lights. The pulsing beat of a house track

Flashing lights. The pulsing beat of a house track. Two people in a dark corner. Smoke wafting out of a joint. Dancing, like really dancing, in a way that would be embarrassing if not for the boldness it requires.

Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s “Party Girl” (1995) inhabits New York City’s vibrant and occasionally gritty club scene through the eyes of its titular party girl, Mary (played by an outrageously perfect Parker Posey). She dances until the morning in colorful designer clothes. That is, until she throws a party to raise rent money but gets busted and thrown in jail. Mary’s only way out is her uptight godmother Judy, who hires her as a library clerk. She struggles to get the hang of the Dewey Decimal System, her indoor voice, and not coming to work hungover, but she slowly finds her groove and begins to enjoy the job. “Yes, mama, I know what’s going on, mama,” Mary theatrically drawls in an after-hours shelving session, books piled atop her head.

Nearly 30 years after one party girl was lost to grad school, another was anointed in a neon green light from on high.

“Brat” and its visionary party girl, Charli xcx, revitalized the archetype in 2024. She brought us back to, as Meaghan Garvey wrote in Pitchfork, “a time when the It Girls were hot messes, flashing the paparazzi as they tumbled from the Chateau or looking feral outside Les Deux at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday.” The album flows easily between hyper-energetic songs like “Guess,” “365,” and “Club Classics” that have become, well, club classics, while moodier entries such as “So I” and “I think about it all the time” are hauntingly vulnerable expressions of grief and aging.

Read about evolving club culture, “The Moment,” and more from our Arts & Culture section at the link in our bio.

Story by Abby Slap, Assistant Arts & Culture Editor
Photo by YouTube

Last Thursday, Feb. 19, an unofficial chapter of T

Last Thursday, Feb. 19, an unofficial chapter of Turning Point USA (TPUSA) made its debut on campus. The Wesleyan TPUSA chapter founder, along with staff members from TPUSA and the Leadership Institute, another conservative organization, displayed signs, including one that read “Dump Your Socialist Boyfriend,” and passed out political buttons and pocket constitutions. Soon after, a cohort of about 30 Wesleyan students gathered in disbelief around the table. Within 20 minutes, an unidentified student threw one of the signs, which was then stolen by another student. The TPUSA members left the Usdan University Center, where they were tabling, shortly after.

“In this single incident, lasting approximately an hour, we got a microcosm of where our national discourse stands,” Blake Fox ’26 writes. “One side struggled to listen to a perspective that opposes the prevailing campus orthodoxy. On the other side is a movement built on owning the libs, where provocation is valued over intellectual discourse.”

Read Fox’s full piece and more from our Opinion section at the link in our bio.

Story by Blake Fox, Opinion Editor
Photo from @tpusa_inlandempire on Instagram

Wesleyan Cardinals Gear Up for NESCAC Playoff Acti

Wesleyan Cardinals Gear Up for NESCAC Playoff Action

As February comes to a close, various teams on campus are preparing for the NESCAC playoffs. There’s so much to cover, but a barrage of Argus writers are here to prepare you for all the postseason action coming up this weekend.

Read The Argus’ winter athletics recap and more from our Sports section at the link in our bio.

Story by Ethan Lee, Sam Weitzman-Kurker, Max Forstein, Leila Feldman, & Grace Lee, Sports Editors, Assistant Sports Editor, & Assistant Opinion Editor
Photo by John Mrakovcich

On Wednesday, Feb. 25, over a dozen students gathe

On Wednesday, Feb. 25, over a dozen students gathered in the Zelnick Pavilion to commemorate the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its ongoing occupation of the country.

Organized by Associate Professor of Dance Katja Kolcio and Ukrainian international student Yaryna Kholod ’28, the event drew students and faculty with connections to Ukraine as well as the student body attending in solidarity.

The vigil, which lasted 45 minutes, began with remarks from faculty speakers and Kholod. Attendees read poems written during the war, highlighted posters featuring statistics about the war’s increased violence, and shared postcards comparing how monuments in Ukraine looked before and after the Russian invasion. The vigil concluded with four minutes of silence—one minute for each year of the war—to honor the soldiers and civilians killed and the Ukrainian national anthem.

Read about the vigil and more from our News section at the link in our bio.

Story by Aarushi Bahadur, Assistant News Editor
Photo by Aarushi Bahadur

On Thursday, Feb. 19, an unofficial chapter of Tur

On Thursday, Feb. 19, an unofficial chapter of Turning Point USA (TPUSA) drew crowds when chapter members set up a table at Usdan University Center with attention-grabbing signs and TPUSA merchandise.

The tabling, which began at around 12:20 p.m., ended approximately an hour later, when an unidentified University student threw a sign reading “Dump Your Socialist Boyfriend” that TPUSA had displayed. Another unidentified student caught and ran away with the sign. TPUSA members were sporadically recording throughout the tabling event, with some footage being used in a subsequent post on X.

Co-founded by the late conservative activists Charlie Kirk and Bill Montgomery, TPUSA is a nonprofit organization that describes itself as working to “educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government.” TPUSA is also known for its strong support for President Donald Trump.

This academic year, a small group of conservative-identifying students at the University, led by Austin Bosch ’26, have been attempting to establish a TPUSA chapter on campus. Members of TPUSA have previously not tabled at the University. The Argus confirmed that representatives from the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) and University administrators reported that the University chapter is yet to be approved.

Read about the incident and more from our News section at the link in our bio.

Story by Blake Fox, Aarushi Bahadur, & Akari Ikeda, Opinion Editor & Assistant News Editors
Photo by Aarushi Bahadur

Meghan Kirck ’28 is a prospective psychology and e

Meghan Kirck ’28 is a prospective psychology and education studies major from Orange, Conn., and is the starting point guard for the women’s basketball team. Kirck has taken quite the sophomore surge, coming big in various moments throughout the Cardinals’ season. On Tuesday, Nov. 25, Kirck received an outlet pass and drained a game-winning three-pointer with 15 seconds left to defeat Clark University.

Later in the season, Kirck led the Red and Black with 29 points in a 61–65 loss against No. 12 nationally ranked Bates. In the game, she went 7–11 from beyond the arc, tying Shaleen Bowman ’03 for the single-game record in program history. After draining the most 3s in a single season in program history with 56 last year, Kirck has spent her first two seasons in a Cards jersey, establishing herself as one of the best deep range deadeyes the program has ever seen. Kirck sat down with the Argus to discuss the Clark game winner, her continued dominance from beyond the arc, and the strong sisterhood developed over the course of the season.

Read about Kirck’s season and more from our Sports section at the link in our bio.

Story by Max Forstein, Sports Editor
Photo by Daniel Gessel

“What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to

“What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest—Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest…. It is important that I learn how to be, by that I mean accept everything about me”

– Julius Eastman

I first came across the music of Julius Eastman in a quest for composers who used composition as means to rebel against their circumstances, Omri Riss Chbarbi ’26 writes. Eastman was a sort of chameleon who appeared in the worlds of other composers, whether in making rebellion against aesthetic sensibilities with avant-garde composer John Cage, working with and touring alongside Meredith Monk, or providing vocals and keyboards on Arthur Russell’s 1981 disco album 24→24 Music.

Eastman had found his way into many niches and communities, yet he seemed to have very little recognition. In the past two decades, however, thanks to the work of musicologists such as Mary Jane Leach and Renée Levine Packer, there has been a renewed interest in the life and work of Eastman among performers and academics, though he still is far from widely known outside of the niche community of “new music.”

Read Chbarbi’s ode to Julius Eastman and more from our Arts & Culture section at the link in our bio.

Story by Omri Riss Chbarbi, Contributing Writer
Photo by Stanford University

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