Collections : [Wesleyan University -Special Collections and Archives]

Following graduation from New York University Law School in 1967, Roy Lucas published a landmark article, "Federal Constitutional Limitations on the Enforcement and Administration of State Abortion Statutes," in the North Carolina Law Review. Soon his interest in student rights and other civil liberties issues were overwhelmed as abortion litigation came to him in ever-growing volume. In 1969 and 1970 he helped found, with Morris Dees, the James Madison Constitutional Law Institute with offices in New York City and Montgomery, Alabama.

The Agallian Base Ball Club was the first formally organized baseball team at Wesleyan University from 1864 to 1871.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) was an influential intellectual and writer. He was born and raised in Algeria, but spent most of his life during World War II and afterwards in France. Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.

Alfred S. Roe served with Company A, Ninth New York Heavy Artillery, from January 1864 to June 1865. Roe was captured in the Battle of Monocacy, Maryland, July 9, 1864, and was imprisoned at Danville, Virginia, for nearly eight months. He then attended Wesleyan University, from which he graduated 1870.

After the Wesleyan centennial celebration in 1931, a few alumni began documenting their memories of Wesleyan. In 1939, the Alumni Council set up a Committee on the Collection of Recollections, which canvassed alumni for memories of faculty and anecdotes about Wesleyan history.

Wesleyan University restarted its dormant chapter in the American Association of University Professors with a new constitution on October 9, 1974. Over the following two decades, the chapter took part in negotiations with the administration, including University President Colin Campbell. Beginning in 1977, Nathanael Greene, Vice President for Academic Affairs, would serve as Campbell’s liaison to the AAUP. The activities of the group appear to have dropped off around 1990.

In the 1970s, Wesleyan University students became active against national nuclear arms polices and practices, especially those in New England. The groups of Wesleyan University students involved were the Committee on Environmental Awareness, Connecticut Citizens Conference, Nuclear Resistance Group and Students Opposed to Nuclear Arms Race. These groups organized campus wide informational meetings, showed films and actively participated in walking onto a nuclear arms site in Seabrook, New Hampshire, on April 30, 1977. Around forty Wesleyan Students, along with other activists, were arrested, and some were convicted of criminal trespass due to the April 30 protest.

The Apostles Club was a group of faculty members at Wesleyan University who met once a month from 1894 until 1967 for "literary and social purposes."

In January 1982, Wesleyan University eliminated their aid-blind admissions policy. In response, students from a group called the April 29th Coalition protested the University's decision. The organization collected 1,284 signatures of students demanding Wesleyan return to an aid-blind system. They also demanded several changes to the financial aid and admissions system. Later in the semester, students held a 150 hour sit-in on the second floor of North College, one hour for each year that the University had existed. Although their primary demand for reestablishing the aid-blind system was not met by the end of the semester, President Colin Campbell wrote a statement that the students' demands would be addressed at the next the Board of Trustees meeting and that reinstituting the former policy would be given the highest priority if and when circumstances permitted.

Arthur Benjamin Calef, Wesleyan class of 1851, served in a variety of governmental positions in Middletown and Middlesex County, Connecticut and in the state as a whole, as well as being a delegate to the National Republican Conventions in 1860 and 1864.