Wesley Will 30 Years On

Thirty years ago today we woke up to our first morning at Wesley College, Dover Delaware. We'd spend three years there doing our 80's college movie schtick before stupidly transferring to a non-Jesuit university in Washington D.C. 

Wesley was kind of an odd place back then. It was a Methodist school (duh) in a midsized American city that had been taken over by strip malls and fast-food joints. There were only a few places to walk to get beer or cigarettes or a burger. You really needed a car. The immediate neighborhood to the south of campus was rough, and every semester a couple of kids would get mugged or get beat up for being from Wesley. 

Wesley had a student body of about 1400. Our sense then, and now, is that Wesley was the kind of school you went to if you wanted a high school with dorms. There was a strong jock culture dominating campus. Wesley fielded teams in a dozen sports, both men and women. Most of the kids came from southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. Philly fans abounded. We didn't like the jock culture very much, but they were the ones who managed to get good grades and graduated on time, unlike us. 

Around a quarter of the students were black. The campus self-segregated, which greatly worried the administration, but there was no acrimony. There were a couple of unofficial black dorms and an unofficial black section of the cafeteria. Wesley had a black fraternity and a black sorority and a few black service organizations. Classes were not segregated. They were over there, we were over here, and they were welcome to borrow our notes and we theirs.

By the time we arrived, the administration had been running Wesley into the ground for a few years. There'd been some serious labor strife with the faculty the year before, involving lawyers. The profs were still pissed about it, and urged students to take action. We were one of the dumbfucks who listened and did just that. The student body was shrinking by then as the admin cut costs. On the weekends Wesley was pretty dull. There just wasn't much to do. So we joined a frat. 

To be honest, we never really fit in anywhere on campus. Amongst our friends (one of whom is still close) we were Wesley Will, the beer pounding frat-head. In our frat we were welcomed, but considered kind of weird [Nooooo-Ed]. Most of the people running the college newspaper, for whom we ran the sports section, thought we were a moron. The Wesley College Whetstone in 1992 is worth a post all its own.