What has happened to Wesleyan?

circuitrider
Tue, 29 Jan 2013 13:37:32 +0000

vassardad wrote:

Uh, I think you missed the sardonic if not sarcastic point of mythmom in her reference to our vietnam policies - I don’t think she meant it as a compliment.



Sarcasm duly noted.
Hey, my take on NESCAC is amply recorded elsewhere:

On the other side of the ledger, with assets well in excess of $10 billion and a collecive intercollegiate athletic budget of some $50 million, they have between them only three or four academic departments that might be deemed to have national reputations.



But, as someone else noted almost immediately after I made that remark, notoriety is not why someone would be attracted to a small college. Rather, I submit that NESCAC’s reputation is rooted in their sense of themselves, their sense of place, their sense of mission. In other words, somewhere along the way in their 150 plus years of existence they have managed to acquire that certain something people refer to as, “prestige”. And like it or not, proximity to the ruling class is an indication of prestige.

But, i’m not here to laud NESCAC on its success at branding; I was merely trying to answer the question, “Why are there so few Republicans at Wesleyan?” and I think that as both you and Mythmom have usefully pointed out, the watershed was probably Vietnam when The Establisment effectively split in half over the issue of global intevention in proxy wars against the Soviet Union. Moderate Republicans tended to be on one side of the issue and so-called, “Goldwater Republicans” were on the other.

The same thing happened with their Democratic counterparts, but, unfortunately for the Republicans, their very success as the antii-Communist party left them with very few navigational tools after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

My hunch is that as moderate Republicans fell by the wayside on many college campuses, their places were filled by moderate Democrats. The real tension at Wesleyan isn’t between the right and the left, but between a comfortable suburban success narrative and an insurgent left.