Wes' Prestige as recognized by oher colleges

MrPimpateer
Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:00:16 +0000

@Flying_Pig

My young friend…

I offer my own individual perspective on Wesleyan. I have never purported to offer a “universal” opinion or one which was absolutely correct in every particular. The fact that they are my own opinion and NOT that of every person at Wesleyan is very clear. In those instances in which I tried to capture the prevailing feeling of the institution, the zeitgeist, it was clear that the opinion being expressed was one individual’s take on what that prevailing feeling is/was. In other words - I have never sought to speak for anyone but my own self, and I have never sought to profer anything other than a perspective (an often but not ineluctably contrarian one, at that).

Furthermore, I have tried to confine my observations to matters in which I have direct, personal, firsthand experience. That, while it does not automatically make my opinions correct, nevertheless it gives them some CREDIBILITY. It gives my opinion WEIGHT. It MEANS SOMETHING because I am here at Wesleyan, I went through these experiences or did these things or took these classes, and I had these reactions to them. My words are not gospel, they should be taken with a grain of salt; but like I said above, they’re my own individual opinion, and my opinion carries weight.

That’s all that needs to be said on the matter.



As for the fact that you have a friend who’s a social science major here, and ze enjoys it, therefore I’m wrong/an idiot/unfailingly negative, well, let’s consider this idea.

You claim to have a single friend here at Wesleyan majoring in a social science. Let’s assume you’re not just making this up for the sake of argument. So just because that friend had a “good experience” with “a social science” means I’m wrong when I say that the environment for social scientific inquiry at Wes blows?

OK. I have said exactly which social sciences I am involved in, government and one history. I have given my impressions of my education here in those two fields. Not someone else’s experience, my experience. I evaluate the programs here based on having actually sat through the classes.

Here is what I have found: Wesleyan is a school which focuses much more on humanities than the social sciences. This is both a cultural thing (among students, it’s much more desirable to major in film than history, with the best minds consequently going to film rather than history) and a fact in terms of school resource allocation. The government department here is very small. There is NO International Relations major, as there are at larger schools. Rather, IR is folded in to the government department - there are less IR courses to take, and furthermore, there are less other government courses to take (on politics - comparative, American, and theory) because the Gov department has to support an IR wing. This weakens both programs, because resources have to get stretched farther in order to accomodate 2 totally different fields within one academic department.

As for the history department, there is a scattershot approach taken; there is incoherence within the department. Being a history major you can study anything from intellectual history (philosophy) to American history to Chinese history - but you can’t do it in depth. You can’t go deep, you can’t take more than an introductory course in many fields. My specific example is early modern European politics - there’s nothing to cover this other than a survey course and a couple courses on religion in that time period.

Owned.