Wesleyan in the News: September 2026
President Michael S. Roth ’78 wrote about how students benefit academically and socially by going to college, the impact of artificial intelligence, and threats to higher education in a piece for The New York Times. “It is essential that students also learn how to get better at the work they’ve signed up for,” Roth said. “Discovering one’s passion is not enough. Through vigorous practice, students should learn to work harder and better, so they can go further than they’d thought possible. If they use A.I. to avoid having to work hard, they’ll learn little.”
Roth appeared on NPR Morning Edition to discuss a proposal from the Trump administration to strip tax-exempt status from private schools that provide certain benefits based on race. “This rule from the administration is meant to frighten universities into dismantling programs that benefit students of color,” Roth told Morning Edition. “It's using the IRS to promote the ideology of the White House, and it's extraordinary overreach on their part.”
Roth also went on Real Time with Bill Maher to talk about the state of higher education. The conversation continued on Overtime with Bill Maher, where the panel discussed social media regulation, artificial intelligence, and more. “We have too much of a political monoculture and we have to work really hard to bring other ideas into the campus,” Roth said.
Victoria Pitts-Taylor, professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, was interviewed about body modification procedures by National Geographic, following a rise in breast implant removal surgeries. “Body modification is like fashion, in that it changes,” she says. “Body styles move in waves and cycles. Provocative-looking styles present the female body as an object to be consumed.”
Not all body augmentation activity requires surgery; some is done with fabric as Pitts-Taylor told The Guardian for their coverage of Kim Kardashian’s new bodysuit that has storage space for hip-enhancing pads. “Weight-loss medications have changed many bodies dramatically, but they don’t automatically deliver conventional, ideal beauty, which in the current era is quite hard to achieve,” said Pitts-Taylor. “To be very thin in some areas of the body and thick in others often requires building and sculpting, which can happen in a dressing room with fabric or an operating room with scalpels.”
George Bajalia, assistant professor of anthropology, spoke with The New York Times for a story on rising tensions between two neighboring border towns between Spain and Morocco. Morocco closed the border with nearby Ceuta, Spain to restrict illicit trade of duty-free goods coming from the Spanish town during the pandemic shutdown and did not re-open it. “For decades, people built an economy around that trade, and now it was gone,” Bajalia said. “All these people, the thousands and thousands who made a living out of that border, haven’t had their jobs replaced.”
Wesleyan Media Project co-director Michael Franz, professor of government and legal studies at Bowdoin College, appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered to discuss how data centers have been framed as an issue for voters in political advertising. Franz said the proliferation of data centers is an issue with bipartisan appeal, as polling from June suggests nearly 80% of Americans are concerned about the impact data centers have on electricity cost. “Democrats can latch on to environmental concerns,” Franz said, while Republicans can criticize data centers “to go in opposition to big corporations, in opposition to a system that doesn't care about you.”
Brian Wolpin ’95, a cancer researcher at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, led a clinical trial crucial to the Federal Drug Administration’s approval of a new pancreatic cancer drug. Wolpin was interviewed by The New York Times for a story on the drug. “I have not seen anything like that before in trials we have run in pancreatic cancer,” he said. “I just kept repeating, ‘Wow.’”
