Wesleyan

Wesleyan University sits in Middletown, Connecticut. I was looking for another DIII school to rank and since I have a connection (a brother and a dad went there) I gave it a look.

I was thinking it would be hard to compare DI and DIII, but Claremont set the bar so high that I’m going to keep one big list. Unfortunately for Wesleyan, they really struggle to communicate the value of movement to the general student and as part of their response to student health.

It starts out pretty well with the standard Athletics and Recreation link from the Life at Wesleyan page – though on closer look, the header just says Athletics on this page – and an even deeper look shows that the linked button says Sports and Athletics – so that is three different names for the department on just one web-page. Ouch.

On the Athletics and Recreation page can you guess where Club Sports and Intramurals show up? Yup, at the bottom. They have definitely doubled down on this concept that recreation only involves club sports and intramurals – it’s a trend I am seeing and I don’t like it. I think unconsciously this creates two categories of students – sporty and not-sporty – and that’s not going to help our wellness or a sense of belonging.

The varsity website itself does at least have a unique section for recreation under the Inside Athletics header. But I can’t really figure out what they are offering other than the clubs and intramurals – there is no information on fitness classes or aquatics or outdoor programs. They have a really big pool in their facility picture, but I could not easily find any information about if regular students or faculty/staff could use it. I could not find anything fitness related either until I dug deep into the Clubs and Activities pages. Once again though, it’s called something else, in this case Recreation and Fitness (that makes it four different names if you’re counting). And then sadly the button takes you back to another page that tells you nothing about fitness.

I might just have misunderstood – there is something, but it is called Adult Fitness. I am not clear what it is. Whoops, I finally found it – it’s only for non-undergraduate students.

Here is where it gets really weird, they have a robust PE program. It even has this great statement: The Department of Physical Education and Athletics provides the Wesleyan University community with a spectrum of activities that will be of benefit in developing healthy, energetic, and well-balanced lives. The objective is to meet the needs of students and to engage other campus constituencies in physical activity. But on the Athletics website it is called Wes Community Programs. What is going on here? Where are their student fitness programs?

I’m sure if you are at Wesleyan this all makes sense to you. But as an outsider I can’t really make sense of how it is organized or where I go to find my access point and it has driven me a bit batty, especially in comparison to some of the other strong schools I have seen out there.

I’m so confused I want to give up, but I need to take a quick dive into the campus health and wellness story.

At Wesleyan the highest-level website is Health and Safety. Again I ask, who started this trend of linking these two on websites? Yes, I understand you can’t be healthy if you’re not safe, but the linking of these two just seems odd to me and it has definitely become a trend. One I hope stops at some point. But I don’t have a better option yet. Actually, I do, just have a separate Safety page. It’s important enough for its own title, it really is.

The Health and Safety page talks about physical well-being but almost all in a clinical sense. It, of course, has the obligatory yoga picture but little else pointing students to the benefits of movement on their health. There really is not much more to it – no story at all about how to engage with movement to help students be successful.

So, with that I am just going to add them to the ranking:

Here is where things stand for Rec represented by Athletics – Wesleyan seemed on the right track, but a deeper dive unveiled no real coherent story at all about recreation.

1. Claremont McKenna

2. Colgate

3. Boston College

4. Northwestern

5. St Thomas

6. Penn

7. Rhode Island – the wrong department name really hurts.

8. Wesleyan – they should be higher, but I can’t get over the lack of clear information once you find the recreation information

9. Vanderbilt

10. Oakland – revisited and they are not on the Varsity site at all even though they report there

11. New Mexico

Here are the rankings for Campus Recreation represented in Student Wellbeing. The top four are almost interchangeable. Wesleyan was basically non-existent in this category. Not really surprising knowing what I do about Wesleyan’s focus, but still disappointed in the lack of storytelling about mental health solutions.

1. Claremont McKenna

2. Oakland

3. Rhode Island

4. Northwestern

5. St Thomas

6. Colgate

7. Boston College

8. Penn

9. Vanderbilt

10. Wesleyan – almost non-existent

11. New Mexico

If you are all the way down here, do yourself a favor and look at the last picture in the gallery - it exemplifies how they don't tell their story coherently...and thanks for reading!