I was excited to see that Connecticut’s Wesleyan University is now offering an animal studies program. Though not yet a minor, (unlike the program at New York University, which will be instituting its minor in animal studies next year), the collection of courses in the Wesleyan program are certainly intriguing, and include courses in philosophy, biology and comparative lit.
Wesleyan is rapidly becoming a real center for animal studies. In addition to an important conference coming up next week, entitled “Sex, Gender, Species,” Wesleyan has become the permanent home for, and a partner in, the Animals and Society Institute’s (ASI) summer fellowship program.
If academia is your beat, this is an exciting time to observe this explosion of interest, and help guide it toward an honest examination of what’s really happening to animals. Perhaps you can even jump on the academic bandwagon and get similar courses and programs instituted at your college. As we’ve pointed out before, ASI is an ideal resource for that kind of thought-provoking activism.