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In response to a survey conducted by  with Quinnipiac about the proposed White House compact for higher education, President Michael S. Roth ’78 offered his thoughts about White House efforts to control colleges and universities. “We would do well to remember that American civil society has long been the guardian of our freedoms,” Roth said. “Leaders in civil society must be steadfast in opposition to extortion under the guise of dealmaking.” 

Roth joined  to encourage higher education leaders to speak out against the Trump administration as it cuts billions in research grants, detains student activists, and threatens to cancel accreditation. “When the government now is behaving so irrationally by trying to destroy or undermine some of the most successful parts of the American economy and culture, it’s hard to know how to deal with that kind of power,” Roth said during the event. “I do think the worst way to deal with it is to appease the aggressor—because this is not just about colleges and universities, this is about civil society more generally.”

received a , signifying Wesleyan is in the top two percent of Handshake’s more than 1500 member schools and one of 10 private, 4-year universities in the country to get this recognition.

Victoria Pitts-Taylor, chair and professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, was quoted in  on the decrease in breast augmentation surgeries in Hollywood and beyond. “It’s really no surprise to me that for a time, breast implants were hugely popular, but they’ve lost their appeal,” Pitts-Taylor said. “They’ve become over-present, passé and they’re not compatible with wellness and detoxifying lifestyles people are moving toward.” 

 spotlighted Tammy Ngyuen, assistant professor of art, as her new exhibit, “Political Uses of Madness,” goes up at the UMass Museum of Contemporary Art. Pulling from the archives of Daniel Ellsberg, the exhibit features nine abstract paintings and is soundtracked by a record of a Vietnamese woman and Ellsberg singing a capella. “There’s an invitation for you to suspend yourself in this imaginative space that borrows from a lot of disparate histories put together,” Nguyen said. 

Peter Rutland, Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor in Global Issues and Democratic Thought, and Leo Bader ’26 wrote an article for , which detailed the historical and modern political context of the German government’s recent cancelling of a new bill expanding military conscription.  

Rutland also co-wrote a piece for  on the use of the “Anglo-Saxon” as a derogatory term for western nations in Kremlin-controlled media. “As experts in  and post-Soviet nations, we see the increased use of ‘Anglo-Saxons’ as reflecting deeper trends that tap into Putin’s use of history to justify the invasion of Ukraine and smear his perceived enemies, while exploiting political divisions in Europe and America,” said Rutland and co-author Elizaveta Gaufman, professor from the University of Groningen. 

 quoted Scott Higgins, director of the College of Film and the Moving Image, in a story on the White House’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. Higgins said, “they’re going after students, they’re going after immigrants, they’re going after non-citizens, but they are also going after the intellectual enterprise. So just being on campus, being a professor, being a student puts you in kind of a precarious place, no matter how supportive the campus is.” 

According to , immigration lawyer Cynthia Santiago ’07 is representing CLEAN Carwash Worker Center after one of its employees suffered severe leg injuries and was detained at a hospital for 37 days without charges after an encounter with ICE agents in Carson, California. 

 spotlighted The Highwaymen—a folk quintet founded ¾ÅÉ«ÊÓƵ by Dave Fisher ’62, Bob Burnett ’62, Chan Daniels ’62, Steve Trott ’62, and Steve Butts ’62 during their first year. 

Nicole Lesperance ’00 was interviewed by  about her fifth novel, A Spell to Wake the Dead, which follows two teenage girls as they uncover secrets about their Cape Cod town in the wake of a series of murders. “When I was a teenager myself, I needed to learn how to speak up for myself, how to trust myself. That’s what I would hope a reader would take away—that you are stronger than you think you are,” Lesperance said. “You have the ability to make your life be what you want it to be.” 

Matthew Burrows ’76 appeared on the  to discuss his career in the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Intelligence Council. Burrows, who currently serves as the Program Lead of the Stimson Center’s Strategic Foresight Hub, spoke about several high-profile political events and the prediction of global sociopolitical trends.  

Richie Zweigenhaft ’67, professor of psychology, emeritus, at Guilford College, explained a link between signature size and a person’s ego in a piece for . “A long-time social psychologist who has studied America’s elite, I made an unintentional empirical discovery as an undergraduate more than 50 years ago,” Zweigenhaft said. “The link that I found then—and that numerous studies have since echoed—is that signature size is related to status and one’s sense of self.” 

 profiled Aviva Schnitzer ’28 in her capacity as guard for the Cardinals women’s basketball team and a member of Tribe NIL, which a collective founded in 2025 to amplify Jewish voices in college athletics. She will be representing Team USA in the 2026 Maccabi Games. “Tribe NIL helps remind me, and other Jewish players, that being Jewish isn’t separate from being an athlete,” Schnitzer said. “It’s part of who we are, on and off the court.”