A Spike in Screams Before Graduation
By PETER APPLEBOME
Published: May 25, 2008
MIDDLETOWN, Conn.
At first it just seemed like another high-minded commencement for the eco age — green ribbons, information on buying carbon offsets to negate emissions from long-distance travel, music by Wesleyan University’s manic, thunderous Japanese taiko drummers, an A-list, politically appropriate speaker in Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
But then came an altercation between the police and students, described on campus alternately as “the incident” or “the riot,” and Mr. Kennedy’s withdrawal after his brain cancer diagnosis and the announcement that Barack Obama would pinch hit, Indiana Jones-style. Who says graduation has to be boring?
If everything about college is also about something else — marketing, mission, politics, placating alumni, even education — there was no shortage of story lines to be found in the events leading up to Wesleyan’s 176th commencement on Sunday. But at this historically (if, officials insist, not uniformly) liberal university, no one was complaining about the finale. Let’s face it, Wesleyan’s getting Mr. Obama as a last-minute graduation speaker, even if under trying circumstances, was a little like Notre Dame getting the pope.
“Everyone found out at the same time after we put it on our Web page,” said Holly Wood (yes, but she’s actually just a working-class kid from the Poconos), co-founder of a widely read student blog, Wesleying (wesleying.blogspot.com). “I got out of my car and everyone was screaming, and my phone went off and someone told me, and I screamed. I called my mom, and she screamed. It was like this relay effect of people on the campus, all screaming.”
It has been fairly apparent for some time that if college students were the ones to pick the next president, Mr. Obama would be in very good shape. But few places would be more hospitable than Wesleyan, a school of 3,200 students long known for liberal instincts in politics, arts and campus culture.
Still, even at Wesleyan, there’s a recognition that there’s a fine line between being perceived as progressive and being perceived as one of the last outposts of the Woodstock Nation. So the school’s president, Michael S. Roth, a 1978 Wesleyan alum, is quick to point out less politically correct Wesleyan grads (Bill Belichick ’75, the coach of the New England Patriots, was among those inducted Friday into the first class of the Wesleyan Athletics Hall of Fame). And he says academic rigor, success in the sciences and political activism all coexist comfortably on campus.
“There’s a stereotype based on a little sliver of the campus that became well known in the 1980s, but that’s totally inaccurate now,” he said. “There’s an amazing level of true diversity here; we have a Christian fellowship and Young Republicans, as well as students who want us to divest from doing business with companies that make weapons.”
Students have somewhat mixed feelings. In a brand-name world (and a recession job market), students care about the Wesleyan brand, too, and can do without the more baroque post-hippie notions of life there. On the other hand, some worry that the administration is too intent on creating a watered-down, made-for-the-rankings image, a tension highlighted when Mr. Roth decided it was time to rename the beloved Zonker Harris Day festivities, which paid tribute, often quite literally, to the drug-addled character from Doonesbury. That provided more grist for aggrieved “Keep Wesleyan Weird” traditionalists. The fallback position was to call the event “Ze Who Must Not Be Named Day.”
And then there was the less airy campus controversy that popped up May 16, when Middletown police cars unexpectedly converged on about 150 Wesleyan students celebrating the end of exams on a street of university-owed housing. According to the police and student reports, a bottle was thrown at a police car and things quickly got out of control. Five students were arrested, and the police used pepper spray and Tasers to break up the crowd. At least two students were bitten by police dogs. Mr. Roth, on his blog, cited both inappropriate actions by students and an overreaction by the police, but it was all, as Zonker Harris might have said, a bummer, both as event and as metaphor.
As one senior pointed out, students shouting “Hell no, we won’t go,” after an altercation at a party, isn’t quite the model of civic engagement the largely privileged Wesleyan students say they aspire to. And it did not help that online newspaper comment pages were full of hostile remarks, a reminder that being at an elite university might impress some people but it makes you a fat target for others and that times change but town/gown tensions seem to be eternal.
So students were licking their wounds, and balancing sympathy for Mr. Kennedy with concerns about whether they’d have a commencement speaker when Mr. Obama’s surprise appearance was announced on Thursday.
On Friday, the taiko brigade was pounding away like maniacs on drums and plastic garbage cans and seniors were pondering life beyond Mr. Obama, when they will descend en masse on Brooklyn or Boston, the two prescribed destinations.
Most seemed to proclaim themselves more than satisfied with their Wesleyan education and more or less ready for what passes for the real world. “I’d say I feel as prepared as any 22-year-old could,” said Alex Rosen, a senior from Newton, Mass. “Which isn’t that prepared.”
