Campus Character: Ben Wessel

“I have a really good beard,” said Ben Wessel ’11.5 from beneath the hood of his signature blue and black-checkered sweatshirt, where he is half-asleep.

I told him that it is smaller than I recall it being.

“I’ve been shimming it down,” he said, “Is that a word? Trim. Trim and shave. I’ve been shaving since my bar mitzvah. Since I was a 13. That’s when you become a man. I feel like I’ve been doing this longer than anything else I’ve been doing. When I shave it off people don’t recognize me sometimes, which is weird.”

The first time he did not shave clean was in 10th grade.

“It was a soul patch and it was horrendous,” Wessel said of the facial hair, best described as a triangle that chronically outgrew its boundaries.

Then he moved to a chin block, followed by a goatee. Once he discovered that he could grow a full beard he embarked on a bearded odyssey sporting everything from mustaches and chops to stars and bars.

“It’s very full so I can do a lot of shapeage,” he said.

Wessel is determined to hijack this entire piece into a brief and poignant history of his facial hair, but that wouldn’t be fair to you, my dear readers, as there is so much more to know about Wessel.

For instance, Wessel is a Washington D.C. native and die-hard fan.  His walls are covered with D.C. paraphernalia and he has every intention of returning there after graduation to his uber-intellectual family where conversation is “so like whoa all the time.”

His mom is a policy analyst for AARP and a “cool mom — not like the Mean Girls cool mom who is totally spunky [and] … thinks she’s sixteen sometimes.” His dad is a “huge nerd” who Wessel respects for his singular passion and the weight that his opinions carry as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. While his D.C. home is in a residential neighborhood dangerously close to Maryland, Wessel has very staunch beliefs about the values of urban and rural spaces that lead him to know he will “never live in suburbia.”  When he talks about his family it is obvious that he fits right in with them.

“I really dig my parents and they dig me, which is doubly fun.”

Though they never shared the commonalities of attending the same schools Wessel and his “awesome and smart” 24-year-old sister solidified their relationship when he moved back to D.C. last year. Though Wessel hinted that he may get extra points with his mom for being the sibling who feeds her gossip, he concluded, “If this is in press then [our parents] love us equally.”

In addition to the influence of his family and the cross-generational relationships that he values sharing with parents of his friends, the Sidwell Friends School, a small private Quaker school, is what he most credits with making him the person he is today. Unlike too many folks, “I loved high school,” he said.

At Sidwell, “people are active and curious about the world.  It’s very Middlebury-esque.  It’s in D.C. so I used to skip school to go to rallies on the mall, which is nerdy,” said Wessel.

This tendency, however, makes Wessel’s habit of skipping out on school to be more involved in causes that he cares about, nothing new.
Last year he Febbed himself to go home to do environmental policy work.  Though he remains dedicated to politics, he has yet to decide if that is the field in which he wants to make his life’s work. Far from anxiety-ridden he contemplates the decision saying, “If I do political stuff it’s so vain.  It’s so selfish and self-involved. While it is ultimately for the betterment of the world, in the short term it’s, ‘Look at me, I rock.’ That’s what it’s about, which I think sucks so I don’t know what I’ll do next year, but I think I’ll go to D.C.

“I just love my city.  [However,] there are a lot of issues in D.C. itself – there are a lot of racial issues. There are a lot of poverty issues.  There are no D.C. voting rights, which is bulls***.  D.C. doesn’t have a vote in Congress, which I think is the major civil rights issue of our time.  If you live in D.C. you just have a vote for president,” yet there are more people in D.C. than the entire state of Wisconsin.

From a less critical perspective, Wessel confessed, “I love politics.  I think it’s an avenue to change the world.”

He has seen the system in action because when you say “I’m a Middlebury College student, people listen to you,” which is a privilege that led him to “get really engaged in the governor’s election that happened this past November.”

Along with six other Midd Kids, Wessel organized a “grassrootsy” movement in response to the state Senate vote to close the Vermont Yankee power plant in 2012 and to push for a green replacement. The campaign was a fabulous opportunity for Wessel to “break the bubble” and learn something about Vermont as he met “young people, especially non-Middlebury-like young people” through voter registration and other initiatives.”

Aside from being a great economic boon for the state, because “wind turbines are [so] dope,” Wessel admitted that a wind turbine tattoo up the side of his leg is the only image that Wessel has ever considered putting on his body. He decided against it however, because he was too much of a “pansy” to do it.

Blessed with the ability to grow infatuated with a girl while wearing an apron and a white cap to train for a new job, and have the courage to let her know it, Wessel has a scruffy charm that will serve him well as a politician if he so chooses to take that route. Though Wessel has risen to greatness at Middlebury as a prominent environmental activist, Quidditch player, WRMC DJ and friend to many, if you want to see his formal charm at work you just might have to make a trip down to the admissions office where Wessel loves his job as a senior fellow.

Wessel’s guiding principles are Pseudo-Quaker philosophies derived from the central tenet that “there’s that of God in everyone, so everyone’s a little Jesus.”

He advises that people strive to “meet as many people as you can and tell your crushes you have a crush on them. Prioritize fun over work,” which he remembers to do though a tradition of going to the bar every Monday night with friends despite any work that he might have to do.

“I’m really into people being really honest. I’m really into people not bulls***ing. That’s f***ing dumb. I have a lot of Middlebury philosophies that I’ve hashed out while giving information sessions [to prospective students],” said Wessel. “The cheesy thing that we’re supposed to say is that there is no typical Middlebury student but I think that’s B.S. because I think the typical Middlebury student is someone who isn’t here to just go through the motions and go to college because that’s what you’re supposed to do. They’re here so that they can prep for the greater world and go out and do something f***ing dope.”

Is there anything that Wessel does not like about Middlebury?

“I wish that people would chill out more and recognize that homework is not the most important thing in the world,” he said.  “You’ll be ok if you get a B.”

However, he is an advocate of passion and not slacking-off.

“I’m down with doing the stuff that you’re interested in, majoring in whatever you’re interested in, taking classes that you’re interested in and then work[ing] hard to the point that you think that you’re getting it,” said Wessel. He added, “But don’t stress.”