As I’m sure most of you are aware, there is a Transfer Student thread currently running that was posted by a Wesleyan first-year student: Transferring out of Wesleyan - Transfer Students - College Confidential Forums
Much like a “Chance Me” thread people are advised to direct their comments to the OP - but you know how that goes. Too many issues get raised all at once and it’s hard to sit on your hands. That thread was amazing in that
- It featured an OP that was, at least on the face of things, an actual student, and
- The maturity and level of sophistication of her writing (surely a testament to the Wesleyan adcom that admitted her ED1 last year.)
It’s pretty much run its course with the consensus summed up brilliantly by @Lindagaf , so if you want to skip the thread and just click on her final reply, I encourage you to do so. But I’d like to continue the discussion here. Not to give advice, but just to hash out some of the issues raised. I was particularly struck by the problems the OP had and is apparently having with the Wesleyan arts community.
I don’t know about you guys, but I was shocked by the amount of emotion around the idea of “artsy” college students. I was a FGLI student 50 years ago who prior to his admission to Wesleyan, spent much of my public school years drawing book report covers, scribbling caricatures of my teachers on the inside of my notebooks and often earning “extra credit” for my work. Long story short: I soon found out that was never going to be my major at Wesleyan. The art department was small; the facilities were almost non-existent; and by that time, I was prepared to move on. I doubled up on English and History courses and never looked back.
But I was proud to follow the university’s progress in building out its dance, theater, music and studio arts programs over the years. It was one of the singular achievements of its post-coeducation expansion.
So, I was gob smacked as I read some of the replies, by the idea that many people consider arts students a negative. I mean, who cares what someone else is majoring in? Then, @gardenstategal patiently explained to me that - apparently - the visible presence of people who appear to be arts majors triggers the same portion of the hippocampus as the presence of preppies and athletes; that
There are also people who are strident and maybe even aggressive in being non-conformist, disparaging those who are more conformist in their self-expression. This group is not inviting or inclusive and can even be threatening and oppressive.
Discuss.
ETA: I guess my real question is why arts students are held to a higher standard than other academic majors (i.e., what other majors are expected to be “inviting” and “inclusive”? No one would expect that of the Physics Department or even of the English or Creative Writing department (if your college has one). People are judged, often harshly, by their work. Why are the arts different?