<p>Not to be argumentative, but instead to make my point and elevate it above a simple bragging about my alma mater at the expense of the other many fine liberal arts colleges we have, I would like to expand on my ideas. I did not write, nor did anyone else here write that I see, that “no matter what other alums say their school is not as intellectual as Wesleyan”. What I did write is “Wesleyan is fairly unique, despite what other alums from other liberal arts colleges may say, in the degree to which ideas are taken seriously”.</p>
<p>Please re-read what I actually wrote; I used the qualifier “fairly unique”. I was writing about Wesleyan’s intellectual tone. Which colleges seem to be comparable in tone? I would say Swarthmore, Carleton, Grinnell, to mention the most obvious ones. While these are subjective, qualitative comments, I think making these points can be helpful for prospective students who seek a rich intellectual atmosphere where it is commonplace, and not seen as weird, to frequently have discussions outside of class about the ideas and concepts that are discussed in class; where students take these ideas and put them into action, for instance in Wesleyan’s Civic Engagement certificate program, and majors in the Science and Society, in the College of Letters and the College of Social Studies, just to name a few of the “uniquely intellectual” programs at Wesleyan. </p>
<p>I am actually an alumnus of one of those major programs, and I can tell you with a fair amount of certainty that there is not a comparable undergraduate major program in the US. What Wesleyan does particularly well, throughout almost every major in the curriculum, is to include rigorous study of philosophy and theory that you will rarely see in comparable-sounding majors across other liberal arts campuses. This inclusion gives students across majors a deep intellectual appreciation for the roots of knowledge in the field of their choice and allows them to begin to learn to think, write and speak critically. It also permits Wesleyan to have one of the highest rates of students going on to PhD programs among liberal arts colleges.</p>
<p>Add to this the incredible breadth and diversity of lectures, conferences, and exhibits that come onto campus (thanks in part to Wesleyan’s location between New York and Boston and faculty contacts), the large proportion of faculty who are involved in research (and who thus can offer research internships to undergraduates) and the presence of several Master’s and PhD programs on campus, and you come up with an intellectual atmosphere that is at least fairly unique.</p>
<p>It is important for students who seek the kind of intellectually-oriented college experience that I am describing to know what Wesleyan does offer, because so often it is wrongly characterized as a weed-infested, irreverent New England outpost where a student can hang out for four years, easily pick up a degree and go on to a slacker-like existence. The press likes to pick out some of Wesleyan’s quirks and generalize because it makes an amusing story. But it is not what I experienced years ago, nor what my sophomore son is experiencing at Wesleyan now.</p>