Reflections on October 7th

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A year ago today, I wrote on my blog about the “sickening violence” of the massacres and kidnappings by Hamas. Little did I know that the violence would provoke a response that, while profoundly degrading Hamas’s military abilities, would kill tens of thousands of civilians and result in the destabilization of the entire region.

But I don’t want to write about events in the Middle East, about which I have strong feelings and slight expertise. I do want to talk about how the past year has affected education. We’ve seen fear and loathing — resulting from Oct. 7 and its aftermath — spread across the US and onto college campuses.  It would be an understatement to say that many on campuses are increasingly wary of one another. It doesn’t have to be that way, as I have written in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education (which I draw on here).

As students and teachers, as people devoted to education, we must try to learn from all this. We can model meaningful opportunities for sustainable peace by showing that strong differences don’t have to end in violence. Wesleyan has programs that do just that. The Office of Equity and Inclusion, Academic and Student Affairs, along with the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, have all initiated educational activities to help students, faculty and staff build a greater capacity to have dialogues across difference. Sociology Professor Robyn Autry has been working with colleagues here, at Harvard and at the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, to integrate intellectual diversity and open conversation across the curriculum. Executive Director Khalilah Brown-Dean is building on the Allbritton’s history of community partnerships to help students learn to listen more deeply, respect differences of opinion, and find ways to take positive actions even when disagreements are not fully resolved. With the help of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and the Templeton Religious Trust, the Chaplains use a similar model as they build interfaith literacy across religious groups that might at first glance seem to have irreconcilable world views.

At the heart of all these efforts is a commitment to pluralism, not sectarianism — a commitment to learn from those whose views are different from one’s own. Building on that engagement, we can foster conversations that take us beyond the borders of the university, leaving our comfort zones to engage with our fellow citizens and not just with like-minded undergrads and professors. In the coming months, we will be announcing grants to support this kind of work — both at the curricular and co-curricular levels. Going beyond a defense of freedom of expression, as Eboo Patel has counseled, we can integrate pluralism into a great many aspects of the education we offer. We can model a pragmatic liberal education that comes from cultivating connection, not canceling perceived enemies.

October 7th is a day of mourning for many on our campus, and I am hopeful that everyone here will respect that. However one marks this sad day, let us remember that education depends not just on free speech and critical thinking, but on a willingness to listen for the potential to build things together. A year ago, I ended my blog post like this: May the wounded receive care, the kidnapped be returned to their homes, and the bereaved find comfort. And may it not be long before the peacemakers can find a way. Alas, it has now been a year with scant prospects for peace. Let us do what we can to help peacemakers find a way. At a time when so much is being destroyed, let’s be peacemakers who together use our education for constructive purposes.

Turning Towards Peace for the New Year

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As I prepare to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, I looked back on my first High Holiday season at Wesleyan in 2007. That week I found a vibrant faith community, as I was able to attend both High Holiday services and the Imam’s sermon marking Ramadan. I was struck at the time by the ways that students from different religious cultures managed to learn from one another while also holding onto distinct traditions.

In this season, we are in some ways in a very different place. It is certainly still true that we have active groups of students, faculty, and staff oriented toward the world, at least in part, through their religious traditions. With foundation support and leadership from our chaplains, we now have an Interfaith Literacy Program that has been working with students to create programs on campus to support deeper understanding of different spiritual, religious, and ethical traditions. This understanding, I expect, will spread across the student body so that people with passionate commitments to different political and moral positions will learn how to have meaningful conversations across their differences.

On many campuses today, and Wesleyan is no exception, these conversations often break down over moral and political positions. The current war in the Middle East has flooded our screens and our minds with horrific images, and it is no wonder that people here want to stop the killing. There are, of course, very different views of how to achieve peace in the region. But reminding ourselves that peace is the goal might turn us toward more constructive dialogues across our differences.

Tonight, along with Jews around the world, I will celebrate the beginning of a new year. We will say “Shana Tova,” meaning simply “good year.” We will think about turning ourselves to better lives, for ourselves and for the communities of which we are a part.

What will make it a good year? More life, more peace.

Shana Tova!

On September 11, Work for Peace

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Over the years on September 11, I have reflected here on the meaning of this sad date in American history. Like so many others, I remember watching the news as a plane slammed into the Twin Towers. The terrorists killed thousands of people going about their lives and unleashed a series of wars that would kill many times the number of the unfortunate souls who died that day.

The parents of murdered hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin talked of “a surplus of agony on all sides of the tragic conflict in the Middle East. In a competition of pain, there are no winners.” They called for peace. Mothers and fathers of Palestinian children killed in Israel’s war against Hamas also call out for peace, as do hundreds of thousands of protesters on the streets of Israel. They call out for an end to the fighting so that they can go about their lives, rebuild their communities.

Some persist in believing they can achieve peace or security through continued fighting. They should listen more to the mothers of these dead children, and the children who have had to bury parents and grandparents. A cease fire is within reach. We should do all we can to encourage leaders to make it happen.

And this day, above all, we should remember the cold brutality of terrorism. Often the person who unleashes terror wants more war, wants more killing. Usually, they have an ideology that makes it easier for them to embrace cruelty without feeling any pain themselves. Morally despicable, they wrap themselves in the righteousness of belonging to a cause. We must reject their fatuous arguments and reject their celebration of rape, of murder, of annihilation.

On September 11 we honor those who have died in these attacks by working for peace.

The Semester Begins!

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This morning the following message went out to the campus community. Written a few days ago, it arrives in boxes amidst more tragic news from Gaza and intense uncertainty here at home. What can we do in such times? We can commit to education — to learning from one another, from traditions that inform our lives and through modes of inquiry that will shape our futures.  I am so happy that tomorrow we will begin classes, and I am thrilled to be meeting my new Virtue and Vice students for the first time. Across this beautiful campus and beyond, we will learn together.

Dear friends,

To the Class of 2028 and our newest transfer students—welcome! I hope by now you have settled into your dorms, begun to make connections, and are feeling ready for the journey ahead. To our returning students, faculty, and staff—including those who have worked tirelessly this summer to prepare for the fall semester—welcome back!

We are starting the 2024-25 academic year at a time that feels immensely consequential. With America in the throes of a heated presidential election and global conflict at dangerous levels, there is much to be concerned about—and much to attend to. At Wesleyan, we believe that our work should be committed to both the good of the individual and the good of the world. Here we seek to empower individuals through a pragmatic liberal education that also cultivates our ability to attend to one another, understand broadly diverse perspectives, and engage with the issues in positive ways. To do this, we foster an environment that supports free inquiry and expression and that is “safe enough,” encouraging passionate debate free of intimidation or harassment.

We are excited by the arrival of Khalilah L. Brown-Dean as the Rob Rosenthal Professor of Civic Engagement and the Executive Director of the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life. Dr. Brown-Dean has already developed some stirring initiatives to encourage students to take action at this important moment for American democracy, which you can read more about in a recent post. I hope you will find meaningful ways to engage with Dr. Brown-Dean and her team’s work in the months ahead as well as our broader programming through the Democracy 2024 initiative. Remember that National Voter Registration Day is Sept 17!

At the Center for the Arts, we can look forward to inspiring programming from this year’s CFA Artist-in-Residence Anna Deavere Smith and a new music theater work by Sunny Jain  that looks to performance’s power to assemble community across diaspora. The new Pruzan Art Center will soon feature an exhibit from the Davison Art Collection featuring works by Glenn Ligon ’82, Hon. ’12 and Jasper Johns. At the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism, Merve Emre’s speaker series, “The Art of Editing,” will welcome to campus the likes of Emily Greenhouse ’08 (New York Review of Books), Radhika Jones (Vanity Fair), and Kaitlyn Greenidge (Harper’s Bazaar), among other important figures.

And make sure to catch some athletics action this season—perhaps a field hockey game on our brand new blue AstroTurf field. You may have seen a similar one this summer at the Paris Olympics. Or catch the night game that opens our home football season on September 21. Our athletes do us proud!

Given the times, this will likely turn out to be a political semester as Wesleyans engage with important local, national, and global issues. We will not protect individuals from opinions they don’t like, but we will protect each and every person from harassment and intimidation. There will surely be protests, but we will not allow these to disrupt the educational mission of the University. That mission includes cultivating attentiveness and care for one another across our many differences. We shouldn’t just expect agreement, but at Wesleyan we trust that disagreement can lead to learning.

I look forward to the exciting semester ahead.

Sincerely,

Michael S. Roth
President

Arrival Day!

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Here we are again! After meeting athletes, international students, and participants in our First Gen program, today The Frosh Arrive! I so enjoy this day filled with promise, excitement…some tears and tons of smiles. This morning’s sunrise was very peaceful, but now there are cars everywhere, Wes athletes carrying trunks, bags and refrigerators, and many a parent wondering what it will be like on the ride home. 

It was a jubilant day…from carrying boxes (THANK YOU WES ATHLETES!) to speaking with parents in the chapel, to teaching the class of 2028 the fight song. Plus, our orientation staff did a STUPENDOUS musical performance on Denison Terrace.

HERE WE GO!!

Wrestling with Memory

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This week The Wall Street Journal published my review of the very interesting Final Verdict: The Holocaust on Trial in the 20th Century. I re-post here.

Confronting Complicity

Bruno Dey was just starting school when Hitler came to power in 1933. In 1944, at the age of 17, he became a member of the SS. A heart condition prevented himfrom fighting on the Russian front, so he was assigned to a watchtower at the Stutthof concentration camp, near present-day Gdańsk, Poland. In 2019 he was tried, and later convicted, in a Hamburg court as an accessory to murder. More than 5,000 people died at Stutthof as Dey stood watch, a rifle upon his shoulder.

Dey’s trial followed the more famous court proceedings of John Demjanjuka decade earlier. Demjanjuk was accused of brutal sadism and was convicted in Munich of being an accessory to more than 28,000 murders at the extermination camp near Sobibor, Poland. He died in a German nursing home while his verdict was being appealed.

Recent cases such as these, against accessories to the mass murder of civilians—mostly Jews—stand in stark contrast to the cases brought against the Nazis in the aftermath of the war. In “Final Verdict: The Holocaust on Trial in the 21st Century,” Tobias Buck tells us that, back then, “perpetrators had less to fear” from Germany’s “prosecutors and judges than common thieves” did. As the nation sought to move on from its sordid crimes, Mr. Buck tells us, officials during those early postwar years showed “unfathomable leniency” toward Nazis, who had roles in the deaths of millions.

This was the milieu in which Mr. Buck, a German-born editor at the Financial Times, grew up. His grandfather had been captured by the Russians and imprisoned for years in the Soviet Union, and in the Buck family talk about the war focused on the hardships experienced by Germans as the Nazi regime fell and the country’s cities were destroyed by Allied bombs. “This strange inversion of history was typical of the postwar years,” Mr. Buck writes, “which saw a nation of perpetrators revel in its own victimhood.” The author describes staring at a picture of his grandfather wearing a swastika armband: He sees the typical German—no monster, no criminal, but exactly the kind of person who made monstrous criminality possible. “Complicity was everywhere, as were the excuses and justifications that kept both a legal and a wider moral reckoning at a distance.”

Mr. Buck is drawn in particular to Dey’s trial as yet another reckoning with the moral legacy of a German generation—and likely one of the last times a court of law would hear from witnesses with firsthand accounts of what happened during the Holocaust. As Halina Strnad, a 90-year-old Jewish survivor testifying from Australia, recounted horrors still shocking to read about, she told the judge that, “in the camp, we said that if we survive we shall have to testify until we die.”

After one particularly disturbing piece of testimony, a survivor-witness expressed forgiveness to Dey and even asked to embrace him. It seemed that everyone in the courtroom was moved. A short time later it became clear that the “testimony” was a fantasy and that the “survivor” had made it up. “There is something powerfully seductive about victimhood,” Mr. Buck notes. And about sentimental stories of forgiveness.

The author provides a powerful guide to the proceedings and their context. No one doubted that Dey was a minor figure at Stutthof, but what did it mean to be a “minor figure” at a place that killed so many? The judge in the case was determined to show that even a lowly guard in a watchtower should have known that he was part of a horrendous crime and that even a soldier in the SS should have been able to refuse to participate in mass murder. Yet Dey seemed baffled by the notion that he could have walked away from his post. Even in the face of evidence presented by a historian showing that no guards had been punished for refusing to serve in a concentration camp, Dey asked: “Where is my guilt?” The judge concluded that even as a young man in the SS, Dey had the freedom to choose how to act. He chose the Bequemlichkeit des Gehorsams—the “comfort of obedience.”

After a nine-month trial, Dey was found guilty and was sentenced to two years of probation, with jail time suspended. Was justice served? Mr. Buck’s readers are left to wonder.

“Final Verdict” doesn’t present new information about the Holocaust, but it does provide a fresh perspective on how Germans have negotiated their sense of historical and individual responsibility. Mr. Buck shows that as memories of World War II dim, and as the country increasingly becomes a nation of immigrants, Germany must redefine its relation to its past, especially the Holocaust. How should one remember atrocities committed long ago? How should that memory inform contemporary political decisions?

In Germany today there is much talk of the brutality of colonialism, and there is resistance to the official prohibitions concerning criticisms of Israel. There is also a resurgence of political groups that openly express nostalgia for the Nazi period. And in almost every major city in the country one finds efforts to remind people of “their” responsibility for the efforts to exterminate the Jews.

Dey’s trial reached a conclusion, but the debates about responsible “memory culture” continue. “As long as we argue,” Mr. Buck writes, “we won’t forget.”

A historian who testified at the trial called Nazism a “consensual dictatorship,” a form of tyranny in which people willingly, often enthusiastically, participate. Bruno Dey was an ordinary German, but he was convicted because the court found that he should have refused to go along with a murderous regime that he knew was wrong. The judge and the prosecutor told Mr. Buck they wondered whether they had raised their own children “to be strong enough to say no.” Have we?

Mr. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University and the author of “Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living With the Past” and, most recently, “The Student: A Short History.” 

Appeared in the July 24, 2024, print edition as ‘Confronting Complicity’.Videos

 

Reject Political Violence

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Feelings of sorrow and disgust last night as I heard the news of the assassination attempt against Donald Trump at his campaign rally. As of this morning, the gunman, deceased, has been identified, and former President Trump is recovering. One spectator is dead, and two others are critically injured. We know little more about the context for this sad, frightening event. Our hearts go out to those close to the victims.

We do know that the attempt to kill someone running for elected office is an attack on democracy itself. However flawed our political system, it should protect our ability to participate in the public sphere, to talk with one another about issues of common concern without the threat of violence. The gunman yesterday may have been aiming at Donald Trump, but we are all victims when someone stops a political rally with gunshots.

In the past when I’ve had to write about violence on this blog, I’ve turned to the philosopher Eric Weil. This refugee from the Nazis who remade his life in France taught that that the violent rejection of meaning and direction (what he called sens) was an ongoing threat against all attempts at reasonable politics. We can, though, choose speech as an alternative to violence. Politics, like education, depends on our ability to speak freely, to engage in public conversations. We need those proverbial safe-enough spaces to construct a political sphere worth participating in. Violence makes this impossible.

We don’t, as I’ve said far too many times, have to live this way. We must publicly reject violence and embrace freedom of speech and association. These are preconditions of any attempt to create a more just political sphere.

All of us can contribute to this vital endeavor.

 

 

Dream America on July 4th (and then to work!)

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We hold these truths to be self-evident…. Ah the words still stir positive emotions in me even as our country seems to careen towards a moral and political abyss. Where to look for inspiration, for hope, on this Independence Day?

In past years, I often turned to Frederick Douglass, whose “What to The Slave is the 4th of July” remains one of the great pieces of American oratory. And I’ve turned to Jefferson and to Dewey, or to the ever ebullient Walt Whitman. During the pandemic, I found my points of orientation in the public intellectuals Darren Walker (Ford Foundation) and Danielle Allen (Harvard). They saw in our Independence Day a reminder to do better, to strive for more in our public life than provided by the status quo.

This year I turn again to my old teacher, the philosopher Richard Rorty, who saw with uncanny perspicacity what dangers would face the Republic. In the late 1990s he wrote that before too long the following would happen:

Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.

Many quoted this passage in 2016, and I trust many will return to it again. Rorty was good at sketching out where our political crises were likely to come from.

Dick was even better at showing that in the face of those crises we should form alliances to create political changes that would ease the burdens of the most vulnerable while creating more space for additional, perhaps more thoroughgoing reform. This is the hard work of coalition politics. The work not of canceling those with whom one disagrees but of finding ways to work across differences for goals of common interest. Images of those common interests, our common interest, are made by artists — by poets, novelists, painters, and others who can imagine our community with a brighter future. We might call these dreamers:

You cannot urge national political renewal on the basis of descriptions of fact. You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as in the terms of what you know it to be now. You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual.

Sometimes it’s especially hard to summon those feelings of loyalty; sometimes it’s hard to dream. But that’s when it’s time to work with others to become practical idealists, working together to create the conditions for what we hope our country can become. Let’s recommit to that today, July 4th.

Colin G. Campbell

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Yesterday I shared the following message with the Wesleyan community.

Dear Friends,

I am saddened to report the death of President Emeritus Colin G. Campbell, MA ’71, Hon. ’89 on Friday at the age of 88.

Colin guided Wesleyan through an exceedingly challenging time with great skill and fortitude. When he became president in 1970 at the age of 34, Wesleyan was adapting to profound social changes at the very moment when financial instability threatened to jeopardize the University’s future. He had the unenviable task of managing retrenchment in order to align Wesleyan’s high aspirations with constrained resources, all the while keeping vocal constituencies in productive dialogue. His ability to manage this daunting task while eliciting universal respect was nothing short of remarkable.

Colin believed deeply that the only way to reach a sound decision was through a sound process in which all parties had an opportunity to participate and be heard. He exuded civility and mostly, though not always, received it. His patience for process, for digging down to the nugget of a hard problem, was legendary. He dealt with campus controversies, such as divestment from U.S. firms in South Africa, by insisting that students immerse themselves in issues and learn from them. He rarely showed impatience, and if he needed relief from the demands of a turbulent campus, he found it on the water at his beloved Black Point home on the Connecticut shore.

A full list of Colin’s accomplishments during the 18 years of his presidency would be lengthy indeed. He oversaw Wesleyan’s transition to a fully co-educational campus while the University also sought to be more open and welcoming to students of color, a task that began a decades-long effort to address the persistence of racism in higher education. He worked with the faculty to bring more coherence to the curriculum, led Wesleyan’s first successful capital campaign, and oversaw numerous improvements to the physical campus, ranging from the opening of the Center for the Arts to the expansion of Olin Library.

He had a prodigious memory for the names of people, their children, and their concerns. His personal warmth, his rapport with students, and his devotion to Wesleyan were evident in all he did. He and his gracious wife, Nancy, were a welcoming presence at innumerable campus and alumni events. Wesleyan honored them with the Colin Goetze Campbell and Nancy Nash Campbell Reference Center overlooking Andrus Field and the Colin and Nancy Campbell Chair for Global Issues and Democratic Thought. The couple was instrumental in preserving Wesleyan’s history even as they steered the University into the future.

Colin was my Wesleyan president. I shook his hand when I crossed Denison Terrace in 1978, and he was among the first to call me with congratulations when I was appointed president in 2007. For his many contributions to Wesleyan’s growth as a leading liberal arts institution, we acknowledge his passing with gratitude, admiration, and deep respect. May his memory be a blessing.

He is survived by Nancy, chair emerita of the National Trust for Historic Preservation; four children, Betsy Campbell, Jennifer Celata, Colin M. Campbell, and Blair Campbell; as well as son- and daughters-in-law Robert Celata and Liz Campbell; and eight grandchildren.

A service will be held at Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, Virginia, at 2 p.m. on Monday, July 8, 2024. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and Hospice of the Lowcountry in Bluffton, South Carolina.

Michael S. Roth
President