Wesleyan in the News: September 2026
President Michael S. Roth ’78 reviewed Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History by Benjamin Moser for The New York Times. “Despite his declared aversion to Zionist claims to the Promised Land, Moser still manages to wrap himself in sentimental attachment to land-based nationalism,” Roth wrote.
Roth also appeared at Duke University alongside Robert George, professor of politics at Princeton University, for a conversation on the importance of academic freedom in the humanities, according to the Duke Chronicle. Roth said academic freedom promotes civil discourse because “open-ended inquiry is a way of practicing freedom, and that practice of freedom is essential for good teaching and good scholarship.”
Ahmed Badr, director of the Patricelli Center for Entrepreneurship and assistant professor of the practice in public policy, wrote a piece for Stanford Social Innovation Review on the ways entrepreneurship education has shifted toward teaching students to engage with power. “Students receiving an entrepreneurial education should be well versed in how power manifests, persists, who holds it, and how it evolves. They must be equally capable of defining their own relationship to it: whether engaging it from the outside, building it from within, or both at once.”
Erika Franklin Fowler, professor of government and co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project (WMP), spoke with Marketplace for a story on the funding of the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas this month, including data on $45 million raised for the convention by a private group. “Dark money is a big factor in U.S. election spending, in particular, because we can't trace where all the money goes back to,” Franklin Fowler said.
Michael Franz, WMP co-director and professor of government at Bowdoin College, spoke with NPR for a story on the rise of the use of artificial intelligence in political advertising. WMP identified 164 AI-generated or enhanced political advertisements this cycle, according to a report earlier this month. Franz said he’s not surprised at the ride in AI use in ads, since “it's a way to enhance the content of your ads, make them look pretty sharp, and it doesn't cost you all that much.”
Franz also spoke with The Hill on the rising use of AI in political advertisements while many voters, contrastingly, have concerns about the rapid construction of data centers. “The data centers are what generate the AI stuff that people are using,” said Franz. “They’re relying in a sense on these data centers to generate these materials for their ads but at the same time they might be telling voters that they don’t want data centers in their own constituency.”
Pluribus News also wrote about this report and interviewed Travis Ridout, WMP co-director and professor of political science at Washington State University, within its coverage. Ridout said that the number of ads utilizing AI is likely higher than the 164 they reported. “A lot of times, we just can’t tell,” said Ridout.
The Columbus Dispatch also interviewed Ridout for a story on the money spent in advertising in the Ohio Senate race. Ridout said Ohio Republicans are running ads focused on immigration, crime, and culture wars to shift the public conversation from cost of living. “The polling at this point is suggesting that Republicans aren’t all that excited to get out to vote,” Ridout said. “Touching on some of those issues that maybe cause anxiety, maybe make people mad, that's a way to get people to pay attention and make them more likely to participate.”
WSHU spoke with Franz following a recent WMP release that over $4 billion has been spent on political advertising this cycle. “Given what we are seeing in 2026, this midterm election will be the most expensive midterm election to date,” Franz told WSHU.
In its coverage of the Maine Senate race, Vox cited a WMP finding that less than 5 percent of Democratic Senate ads mentioned abortion, a stark difference from the previous two cycles.
In a piece for Newsweek, Gary Yohe, Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies, emeritus, rejected the idea that climate disaster can be “unimaginable.” Yohe wrote that the United States alone endured over 400 weather and climate disasters between 1980 and 2024, with damage from these events collectively exceeding $2.9 trillion. “That word should make us uncomfortable,” Yohe said. “Calling a disaster unimaginable suggests that nobody could reasonably have anticipated it. After decades of climate science, that explanation is becoming increasingly difficult to defend.”
Other Headlines
Roth 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.”
Franz 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.’”
