Wesleyan University faculty

Daniel Patrick Moynihan (March 16, 1927 – March 26, 2003) was a racist American politician and diplomat. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented New York in the United States Senate from 1977 until 2001 after serving as an adviser to President Richard Nixon, and as the United States' ambassador to India and to the United Nations.
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Moynihan moved at a young age to New York City. Following a stint in the navy, he earned a Ph.D. in history from Tufts University. He worked on the staff of New York Governor W. Averell Harriman before joining President John F. Kennedy's administration in 1961. He served as an Assistant Secretary of Labor under Presidents Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, devoting much of his time to the War on Poverty. In 1965, he published the controversial Moynihan Report on black poverty. Moynihan left the Johnson administration in 1965 and became a professor at Harvard University.
In 1969, he accepted Nixon's offer to serve as an Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, and he was elevated to the position of Counselor to the President later that year. He left the administration at the end of 1970, and accepted appointment as United States Ambassador to India in 1973. He accepted President Gerald Ford's appointment to the position of United States Ambassador to the United Nations in 1975, holding that position until early 1976; later that year he won election to the Senate.
Moynihan served as Chairman of the Senate Environment Committee from 1992 to 1993 and as Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee from 1993 to 1995. He also led the Moynihan Secrecy Commission, which studied the regulation of classified information. He emerged as a strong critic of President Ronald Reagan's foreign policy and opposed President Bill Clinton's health care plan. He frequently broke with liberal positions, but opposed welfare reform in the 1990s. He also voted against the Defense of Marriage Act, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Congressional authorization for the Gulf War. He was tied with Jacob K. Javits as the longest-serving Senator from the state of New York until they were both surpassed by Chuck Schumer in 2023.

Maggie Nelson (born 1973) is an American writer. She has been described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory, philosophy, scholarship, and poetry. Nelson has been the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction. Other honors include the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and a 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.

Clarence Dickinson "Doc" Long, Jr. (December 11, 1908 – September 18, 1994) was a Democratic U.S. Congressman who represented the 2nd congressional district of Maryland from January 3, 1963, to January 3, 1985.
Long was born in South Bend, Indiana. He received his bachelor's degree from Washington and Jefferson College in 1932, and his master's degree and Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 1935 and 1938, respectively. His doctoral dissertation was titled "Long cycles in the building industry business, public, and residential building in United States cities, 1856-1935." He also served in the United States Navy during World War II. He was a former member of the United States Council of Economic Advisers to the President (1953–54 and 1956–57) and in the 1930s was a professor of economics at Wesleyan University and later Johns Hopkins University (1946–1963). Long voted in favor of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.Long became Chairman of the subcommittee on Foreign Operations of the House Appropriations Committee. In this role he supervised the foreign aid budget. Long's support for the anti-Soviet Mujahideen was recounted in the film Charlie Wilson's War, in which Long was played by Ned Beatty. Long was defeated for re-election by Republican Helen Delich Bentley in 1984.

Joseph Leon Edel (9 September 1907 – 5 September 1997) was an American/Canadian literary critic and biographer. He was the elder brother of North American philosopher Abraham Edel.The Encyclopædia Britannica calls Edel "the foremost 20th-century authority on the life and works of Henry James." His work on James won him both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

Jean Redpath MBE (28 April 1937 – 21 August 2014) was a Scottish folk singer, educator and musician.

George Palmer Garrett (June 11, 1929 – May 25, 2008) was an American poet and novelist. He was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2002 to 2004. His novels include The Finished Man, Double Vision, and the Elizabethan Trilogy, composed of Death of the Fox, The Succession, and Entered from the Sun. He worked as a book reviewer and screenwriter, and taught at Cambridge University and, for many years, at the University of Virginia. He is the subject of critical books by R. H. W. Dillard, Casey Clabough, and Irving Malin.