Due to an unprecedented number of students applying for General Room Selection for the 2019-2020 school year, ResLife has announced that it will be opening up three rooms in President Roth’s house for students that were forced to wait until summer for their housing assignment. Each of the rooms will be single-sized forced triples, most likely occupied by sophomores who are desperately vying for a room in a system that requires you to live on campus but doesn’t guarantee you a bed.
While at our penultimate* meeting of the semester, we were scrolling through our twitter tl looking for some ~cool content~ to retweet from our fellow students we came across THIS RIDONCULOUS TWEET:
What do I do? pic.twitter.com/IMDs2z7cA5
— Michael S Roth (@mroth78) December 9, 2018
As we tweeted: “what the fukc?????”
Other followers of his also responded to the tweet:
I don’t know Michael. I think his instructions are quite clear. At the end of the second paragraph. :)
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) December 9, 2018
Otherwise there are wide range of images for you to send him. pic.twitter.com/v0MCW4Cg19
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) December 9, 2018
@mroth78 whatcha doin bro?
— Saadia Naeem (@saadia_naeem23) December 9, 2018
?
— Baker Media Inc. (@BakerMediaCorp) December 9, 2018
— conner barrett (@grizzlybearrett) December 9, 2018
We don’t know how to end this post, so we’ll just leave you with the words of our fearless leader: “What do I do?”
the smiling face of our watchful overlord, peering over the masses from his perch on the newly redesigned website
President Michael Roth ’78 is holding the third State of School Address today at 3pm in the Memorial Chapel, and Wesleying is liveblogging the whole thing!
As in previous years, the event is co-sponsored by the WSA, the Argus, and the Ankh. It will consist of an hour-long Q&A, moderated by three students—a member of the WSA, a member of the Argus, and a member of the Ankh. In an email to the student body about the event WSA president Emma Austin ‘19 shared links where students can submit their questions to President Roth or share a comment for student representatives to pass on to the Board of Trustees. After the State of the School there will be a student-only debrief in the Zelnick Pavilion.
Hot-button issues for this year’s State of the School include CAPS staffing, staff and student worker conditions, and, of course, the controversial website redesign.
In her email, Austin shared the history and intention of the State of the School Address:
“This event grew out of students’ desire for more transparency from the Administration. Scheduled at the beginning of the year and days before the Board of Trustees meeting, the State of the School is designed to ensure that student opinions are heard and heeded as they Administration plans for the years ahead.”
For an in-depth recap of the event in previous years check out Wesleying’s liveblogs of Roth’s 2015 and 2016 addresses. (Note: Due to low student turnout, Austin explained that the event was changed from an annual address to a biannual address, which is why there was no address in 2017.)
Read on for our liveblog of the event.
From the CFA:
Wesleyan President Michael S. Roth ’78 interviews Henry Adams, Ruth Coulter Heede Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve University and Menakka, and Essel Bailey ’66, Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the College of the Environment at Wesleyan, about Professor of Art Tula Telfair‘s new book, “Tula Telfair: Invented Landscapes.” Ms. Telfair’s hyper-realistic landscape paintings are at once awe-inspiring and extremely personal. Featured essays by Mr. Adams and Mr. Roth explore the technical and aesthetic aspects of Ms. Telfair’s work, her personal history, and the interplay between realism and invention.
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Arts and the Department of Art and Art History’s Art Studio Program.
Date: Wednesday, October 19
Time: 6-7:30 PM
Place: Ring Family Performing Arts Hall (former CFA Hall)
cfa link
“You have no obligation to protect Scott Backer’s reputation. You instead have an obligation to support our community’s uncountable survivors, and they deserve to know the character of the man who judged one of their most painful experiences. They deserve to know, from you, how Wesleyan intends to do better.”
Roth at a forum on need-blind admissions in November 2012.
The following is an open letter from Andrew Trexler ’14 to university president Michael S. Roth in the wake of campus turmoil caused by recently released information about the firing of former Associate Dean of Students Scott Backer. The views reflected here are the writer’s own.
Michael et al.,
Wesleyan assures us that nationally recognized auditors “found nothing amiss” in Scott Backer’s handling of student conduct and sexual misconduct hearings. Although I am skeptical that Pepper Hamilton was able to thoroughly review years of case files in so short a time, this report is not unexpected. The reality is that the national standards for campus adjudication of sexual misconduct are, in the most delicate terms I can accurately put them, very very fucked. It is therefore no surprise at all to learn that Scott Backer’s handling of these cases meets national standards.
The truth of the matter is that the flaws I witnessed firsthand in three years as a process advisor for students and survivors—constant victim-blaming, hostile questioning practices, inconsistent training of panelists, acceptance of character witnesses, to name a few—would not, I suspect, be of interest to Pepper Hamilton. They were not of interest to Wesleyan’s Title IX Officer when I raised them at the time. The “checks and balances” and sparse appeals system are no help to a survivor who’s told her rapist gets to stay on campus because she was wearing a pretty dress that night and his buddy says he’s a good guy.
I really don’t think there’s “nothing amiss.”
Yesterday, President Michael S. Roth posted about the revelation that former Associate Dean of Students Scott Backer had been fired from Vermont Academy in 2007 for sexual harassment and misconduct, as exposed in a Boston Globe article published Saturday night. Then, this afternoon, he sent out an email announcement to all members of the Wesleyan campus community realizing that he had never apologized for the situation.
With a subject line reading “An Apology,” Roth’s email expressed guilt and a feeling of responsibility for Backer’s presence at Wesleyan, but both in his original blog post and in his subsequent email, it’s obvious Roth hasn’t really been listening to what students, faculty, staff, and alumni have been saying (or read our editorial).
Almost hilariously, he limits the scope of our outrage simply to Backer’s initial hiring in 2007 and to his leadership position in university misconduct proceedings, ignoring community concerns about administrative opacity, inefficacy, and general shadiness. So I have some stuff to say about his blog post and so-called “apology.”
President Michael S. Roth ’78 is back in the Memorial Chapel tonight for the second annual State of the School Address, organized by the WSA in conjunction with the Ankh and the Argus. At 8 PM, Wesleyan’s own pioneer of liberal education will answer questions submitted by current students, and all of these questions will subsequently be passed on to the Board of Trustees to be discussed at their next meeting.
Last year’s address was the first time the WSA had done anything like this. Enacted by last year’s President Kate Cullen ’16 and VP Aidan Martinez ’17, the annual event was established in order to promote and facilitate transparent discussion between students and the administration. As described by the WSA:
The intention of this event is to provide students the opportunity to speak face-to-face with President Roth, ask meaningful questions and hear his reasoning behind major decisions. Through organizing this dialogue, the WSA strives to raise the student voice in administrative decisions and inform President Roth on how to make better decisions to meet our needs as students.
Naturally, we’ll be liveblogging. The structure is as follows:
A student-only debrief will be held afterward in the Zelnick Pavilion from 9:30-10:30. Click through for our liveblog of the address:
Today’s TipBox roundup is full of all sorts of fun stuff, like calls to write for (maga)zines and cook omelets for gov profs, and also an account of pooping at MRoth‘s house! Check after the jump for this and more.
we weren’t sure what picture of roth to use so here is an older one from 2009 that we dug out of our media archive. this is just a placeholder until i take a picture of the actual setup in the chapel, okay
Dasha, astag_rocky, and I are here in the Memorial Chapel for the first annual State of the School address! This is mostly a production of the Wesleyan Student Assembly, but we are co-sponsoring it with The Ankh and The Argus.
The format is as follows: the WSA will have a five-minute introduction, then Pres. Michael Roth will speak freely for 20 minutes. The following hour is all Q&A, with the questions having been submitted throughout the past week. After Q&A, the moderators will offer final thoughts and encourage you to eat ice cream and attend the following student-only debrief, which will happen from 9:30-10:30. Out of respect for its student-only nature as well as its role as a safe space, we won’t be liveblogging the debrief.
Tonight’s address will be moderated by Henry Vansant ’18 from the WSA, Hailey Broughton-Jones ’18 from The Ankh, and Jess Zalph ’16 from The Argus. There will be paper in the chapel for people who have questions in real time and members of the WSA will also be monitoring their twitter (@wsanews) for any relevant and pressing questions.
If you still have questions when this event and this liveblog are over, the WSA will also be sending out a form for you to submit questions to the Board of Trustees, who meet on campus this weekend. We’ll keep this post updated with info about that as we get it.
Shocking news from Inside Higher Ed today: turns out President Roth’s enthusiastic Twitter alter-ego may, in fact, be a fraud. Could @THE_REAL_MROTH be just one of many fake administrative Twitter accounts popping up at universities nationwide? But it all seemed so real . . .
@The_Real_MROTH may be implicated in a larger-scale pattern of administrator-impersonators popping up on Twitter—from Wesleyan to Brown to Texas. More from Inside Higher Ed, after the jump.
