Michael S. Roth ’78 – Page 43

Free Speech, Political Correctness and Higher Education

September 2, 2016 by Michael S. Roth '78

In the past week the University of Chicago made big news by defending academic freedom in a letter to incoming students. “Finally,” a distinguished alumnus wrote in a subject line of an email to me, “some sanity on campus.” Really? How is it possible that a distinguished university polishes its own apple by stating the obvious, that freedom of thought and expression are essential to its mission?

Well, last year was a tumultuous one for campus politics. Events from Claremont California to the University of Missouri to Yale gave plenty of fuel to older pundits already asking, “What’s the matter with kids today?” A chorus of critics of political correctness found common ground in mocking students’ desire for “safe spaces,” their concern over micro-aggressions, their need for trigger warnings. Kids today are coddled, we were told, and when they get to college, they fail to respect the rough and tumble contest of ideas that middle-aged alumni remember as being part of their own college experience. No matter that when most of us oldsters were in college, the campuses were far less diverse places than they are today. There were many voices back then that none of us got to hear.

Why did the Chicago’s Dean of Students feel the need to remind the happy few chosen to be part of the class of 2020 that the university does not support trigger warnings, intellectual “safe spaces” or the cancelling of visiting speakers? What if a faculty member wanted to give students a heads up that they would be reading a racist text or a book about rape so as to help them understand the reasons why it was part of the work of the class? Would giving this “trigger warning” not be part of the professor’s academic freedom? And what if students, as Northwestern’s president Morton Schapiro explained in an op-ed last year, sometimes wanted to hang out in the university’s Hillel so as to feel comfortable (safe) in discussions about Israel? What if students decided to protest a visiting war criminal who has been invited to lecture? Would these run afoul of Chicago’s posture of intellectual toughness?

When confronted with issues of power and inequitable distribution of resources, it’s far too easy to fall back on talk about abstract commitments to freedom and procedures. At a time when violent racism has been exposed as a systematic part of law enforcement, at a time when the legitimation of hatred in public discourse has become an accepted part of national presidential politics, it seems more than a little naive to tell incoming frosh that “civility and mutual respect are vital to all of us.” These students are coming to Chicago, after all ― one of the most violent cities in America. But perhaps the Dean’s letter was aimed at a different audience ― those concerned with the bogeyman of political correctness and those who worry that free speech isn’t the absolute value it used to be. That would explain the concerted efforts of the University of Chicago’s administrators to push for their unfettered marketplace of ideas version of free speech.

That said, I agree that freedom of expression is essential for education and for democracy. But speech is never absolutely free; it always takes place for specific purposes and against a background of some expression that is limited or prohibited. Hate speech and harassment fall into these legal or procedural categories. And there are some things, after all, that a university should refuse to legitimate or dignify by treating them as fit subjects for academic discussion. When we make a subject part of a debate, we legitimate it in ways that may harm individuals and the educational enterprise. We must beware of the rubric of protecting speech being used as a fig leaf for intimidating those with less power.

Last year at Wesleyan University, we had an intense debate about freedom of the press. Some students initially wanted to defund the student newspaper because they found it offensive, but others rushed to its defense. At that time, I wrote:

Debates can raise intense emotions, but that doesn’t mean that we should demand ideological conformity because people are made uncomfortable. As members of a university community, we always have the right to respond with our own opinions, but there is no right not to be offended. We certainly have no right to harass people because we don’t like their views. Censorship diminishes true diversity of thinking; vigorous debate enlivens and instructs.

It’s still the case that the great majority of those studying on American college campuses would agree.

Over time, our students realized that censorship in various forms is antithetical to our educational mission, and they also recognized that the school newspaper could do a better job soliciting diverse of points of view. Rather than merely affirming abstract principle, they worked through an on-the-ground commitment to freedom of expression along with the cultivation of diverse points of view and a sense of belonging. This is not “free speech absolutism” or even a pure standard for campus decision makers to apply. But it is a winning combination for those entering a university, in Chicago or anywhere else.

Cross-posted with the Washington Post.

Welcome to Wesleyan!

August 31, 2016August 31, 2016 by Michael S. Roth '78

It’s finally here! Many athletes, international and first-generation students have been arriving over the last few days, and today the Class of 2020 arrives in force. Here’s Dean Mike addressing international students:

This morning, all was calm as Kari, Mathilde and I walked the campus. But soon hundreds of cars will be unloading on Andrus Field, and the full orientation will begin. I look forward to greeting new students and their families and posting more pictures today.

If you have Arrival Day photos you would like to submit to Wesleyan’s Communications office, please send them to newsletter@wesleyan.edu.

Images from Arrival Day 2016:

Wesleyan Translators!

August 29, 2016 by Michael S. Roth '78

Yesterday Kari received a note from Jim Kates ’67, a College of Letters alumnus sharing the news that he had recently received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship to continue his work on translating the Kazakhstani poet Aigerim Tazhi:

Until recently, female poets writing in Russian did not receive attention commensurate with their male counterparts, and female poets living outside Moscow and St. Petersburg even less so. Tazhi (b. 1981) is helping to change that. This new bilingual edition of An Astounded World will have particular significance both in the U.S. and in the poet’s native Kazakhstan because, as the poet herself states (as translated by Kates), “In Kazakhstan, not even one independent publishing house remains. Most publishers work … as typesetters, living on government subsidies, and publish mainly Kazakh classics or textbooks.” The press that published her book, she adds, closed years ago. The author of numerous award-winning poems, Tazhi was a finalist for the prestigious Russian Debut Prize in Poetry.

J. Kates is a poet, literary translator, past president of the American Literary Translators Association, and current president and co-director of Zephyr Press, a nonprofit publisher of works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia. He is a recipient of NEA fellowships in both poetry and translation, as well as the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation for his Selected Poems of Mikhail Yeryomin (White Pine Press, 2014). His most recent translation, Muddy River: Selected Poems of Sergey Stratanovsky, was published by the Carcanet Press in 2016.

Jim let us know that his fellow COL alumnus, Mark Schafer ’85, is also a distinguished translator who has garnered support from national foundations for his work.

Wesleyan has been a home for translators for a long time. When I was a student, the distinguished poet Richard Wilbur was also translating texts in a most powerful way, and my teacher in philosophy Victor Gourevitch published translations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that are still widely used. We would later collaborate on translating and preparing a critical edition of the correspondence between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève. Today, Norman Shapiro in Romance Languages holds the title “Distinguished Professor of Literary Translation.” He has been honored time and time again for his work at once so elegant and faithful to the original. In Russian, Susanne Fusso recently published an “outstanding” translation of a novella by Sergey Gandlevsky, and she has been praised for her deep knowledge of the history and culture of the author and attentiveness to his “relentless allusiveness.” In German Studies, professor Krishna Winston is a prolific, thoughtful translator of texts literary, philosophical and scholarly. Her work is widely read and regularly praised.

I know there are many more faculty engaged in translation projects. Please forgive me for not listing everyone!

All this brings to mind Prof. Katherine Kuenzeli’s recent award from the National Endowment for the Humanities to prepare a critical edition and translation of a selection of writings by Henry van de Velde. Katherine is an art historian, and she will work with a team to bring the work of this Belgian architect and art critic to a wider audience. Philosopher Stephen Horst has also received a major fellowship from the NEH to continue a project that might be described as translation in a less literal sense. Stephen is going beyond his specialized professional work to write a book aimed at a general audience “that examines the story of early modern science to demonstrate the compatibility between science, humanism, and theism.” I am so proud to see the work of our colleagues recognized by the NEH in this way.

I’ve been thinking this summer about the ways in which liberal education increases our abilities to translate lessons learned in one area to other domains. We learn to discover new possibilities of resonance, new avenues of relevance. At Wesleyan we aim to enhance the ability of students to translate what they are learning into what they will do after graduation. Indeed, the pragmatic liberal education we offer at Wesleyan may be described as translational liberal learning – broad, contextual education aimed at giving our students tenacious yet flexible ways of thinking appropriate for a rapidly changing world.

Wesleyan translators unite! We have nothing to lose but our parochialism!!

Stop the Trump Calamity

August 24, 2016 by Michael S. Roth '78

I published this opinion piece at Inside Higher Education this week. I take seriously the fact that a university should be a place where people from a very wide spectrum of political opinion can discuss their ideas in a context of non-violence. In the past, I have urged students to vote, but I have not played a public role in any election. This year is different, and I don’t think even a college president should be a mere “bystander.”

Over the past few years, Wesleyan University, like many across the country, has provided incoming students (and sometimes staff and faculty members) with classes in bystander intervention. The idea is simple, really. We want to give members of the campus community the tools to act in situations where somebody is at risk: when you see something amiss, do something so as to protect others from harm and make the campus a safer place.

I’ve been thinking about bystander intervention lately in the context of the presidential race. As the president of a nonprofit university, I am advised by legal counsel that I should not take public positions in elections. I know this makes a lot of sense, and over the 15 years or so that I’ve been a college president, I have encouraged electoral participation without being overt about where I stand in regard to any particular candidate.

This year is different. Donald Trump has been using the tools characteristic of demagogues and fascists to do the only thing that really matters to him: gaining power. He will say anything that he thinks will help him win, and there is no telling what he will do if he is successful.

Does he really believe that the “Mexican heritage” of a judge disqualifies him from a case? Does he genuinely condone “Second Amendment people” using violence to stop a newly elected president from making court appointments? Does he actually feel nostalgia for the days when you could beat up protesters?

He does affirm his intention to build a wall and ban Muslims from entering the United States, and he repeats a contention that Barack Obama is the founder of ISIS. You don’t need a fascistic theory of government to use the inflammatory tactics of fascism. It is clear enough: given his rhetoric and behavior, Donald Trump’s election would undermine the foundations of the republic and cause fundamental harm to the country.

Now, I can imagine that some readers will be rolling their eyes and thinking, “What a surprise … another liberal academic trying to use the university to push his own ideological agenda!” And I know that some people would prefer I not opine on politics at all lest I give the impression of speaking for the university and compromise institutional neutrality. Finally, in political matters, university presidents may have a megaphone but not necessarily, so the criticism goes, the relevant expertise.

I agree that my academic position gives me no special skills when it comes to electoral politics. Even though I am a historian, I don’t have much confidence in my profession’s capacity to offer sage counsel in contemporary political matters. But when we ask bystanders to intervene in an unfolding medical emergency, we are not calling on their knowledge of biology. We are asking them to call for help, to sound an alarm. When we ask a student to dissuade friends from binge drinking or other risky behavior that makes them vulnerable, we don’t expect them to be experts in a field. When we encourage people to stop a sexual predator from acting, we don’t need them to have law enforcement experience. We want them to be aware and feel responsible.

I also agree that many colleges and universities suffer from political biases that distort the educational experience of our students. At my left-leaning Wesleyan University, I have found it important to support Republican groups and faith-based clubs. Although I identify as a person on the left, I am developing programs to bring more conservative intellectuals to the campus to teach classes in a variety of fields and to present points of view not heard often enough in the liberal campus bubble. Intellectual and political diversity is a pressing problem in undergraduate education, and teachers have to be much more aware of the dangers of using their classrooms as a platform for ideology.

I do not believe that presidents or other university leaders should normally throw their institutional weight behind a specific public policy or a candidate. But despite my worries about institutional biases, this year I feel strongly that I need to intervene more directly, to join others in sounding an alarm about the grave danger to our political culture. I’ve done this in speeches and in the press, but I don’t think I am intervening enough, given the gravity of the situation. That’s why I am publishing this piece, and why I will continue to call out the dangers that the Trump campaign poses to our political ecosystem. I urge other higher education leaders to do the same. Some of the damage has already been done, as the bar for racist, hate-filled public discourse has been lowered in ways that would have shocked us just a few years ago. Even many who support candidate Trump are revolted by his intemperate, cruel and dangerous remarks.

When we teach students the skills for bystander intervention, we want them to feel empowered to make our campuses safer, more humane places. If faculty, staff or students see a dangerous situation unfolding, we expect them to act. After all, if someone on campus sees sewage spilling into a classroom, detects a noxious odor in a residence hall or simply sees a hallway filling with smoke, we don’t want them just to hope that someone with expertise and responsibility will arrive. We want them to feel responsible for bringing attention to the developing calamity. At the very least, we expect them to sound an alarm when danger threatens.

Donald Trump is a developing calamity for our polity. Whether from conservative, libertarian, religious or leftist positions, we should protect our culture from further Trumpian pollution. Even university presidents, as citizens, must use the tools available to us to sound the alarm as long as the danger threatens. And threaten it does.

On Narcissism and Politics

August 21, 2016August 21, 2016 by Michael S. Roth '78

Kristin Dombek has just published a small, provocative book on how we have come to use the label of narcissism to attack our enemies or to distance ourselves from those who just don’t want to be close to us. By labeling these people as narcissists, she argues, we give ourselves a false sense of superiority. She makes many important points in her essay, but, I suggest in this review from today’s Washington Post, there is now an elephant in the room whose character traits it would be dangerous to ignore.

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In psychology, you’re supposed to grow out of childish narcissism. Now Donald . . .

“No one knows the system better than me,” Donald Trump said when accepting the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, “which is why I alone can fix it.” Mr. Trump has long been labeled a narcissist by people across the political spectrum, an accusation that suggests he has an excessive sense of his own grandeur while also being overly sensitive to any perceived slight. Whatever the topic at hand, narcissists bring it back to themselves. Here’s Trump on why he chose Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate: “So one of the primary reasons I chose Mike was I looked at Indiana, and I won Indiana big.” Moderate Republican (and anti-Trump) columnist David Brooks observed, “There’s sort of a gravitational narcissistic pull that takes command whenever he attempts to utter a compound thought.”

Narcissists. You know the kind. People who may seem really into you one moment and then act as if they don’t know you at all. People who are hypersensitive to any potential disrespect when it comes to themselves but haven’t a clue about the feelings of others. In today’s popular culture fueled by social media, everybody seems to know somebody who can be labeled a narcissist — whether it’s the bad boyfriend, the unfeeling killer or the pretentious artiste. In “The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism,” cultural journalist Kristin Dombek begins by saying that “we know the new selfishness when we see it,” and apparently we are seeing a lot of it these days. In today’s “narcisphere,” she argues, groups that feel injured find it expedient to label those they hold responsible as narcissists. “Narcissism is the favorite diagnosis,” she writes, “for political leaders in whatever party opposes one’s own.”

So maybe we don’t know the kind after all. Maybe we just deploy the label narcissist to feel superior amid our confusion about how others are behaving. Dombek writes breezily and well about the history of the idea of narcissism, leaning heavily on Elizabeth Lunbeck’s excellent “The Americanization of Narcissism.” In the psychoanalytic tradition, narcissism was a normal stage of development — but you were supposed to grow out of it. Sigmund Freud thought narcissism was linked to a strand of femininity that turned inward, lovingly cultivating one’s own beauty instead of turning toward others unlike oneself. Later writers in this field, especially Otto Kernberg and Heinz Kohut, investigated disorders of self-regard that persisted much later in life, and Kohut developed therapies that led from narcissism to relationship building and empathy.

For the psychoanalysts, the typical narcissist was a woman who wouldn’t return male affection, while in today’s self-help industry, it’s the bad boyfriend who exudes only indifference. Dombek notes wisely that historically, “the gender of the archetypal narcissist shifts according to who’s got the power of diagnosis,” and that this power conveys a sense of moral superiority on the person who gets to do the labeling.

In the early 1990s, neuroscientists discovered that in primates, the same neurons lighted up when the animals watched others perform an action as lighted up when the primates did the same thing themselves. Deep in our primitive brains are mirror neurons wired to respond to and imitate others. Some writers have concluded from this discovery that we have profound biological sources of empathy, but Girard and Dombek remind the reader that these neurons are also the sources of competition and conflict. “On just the other side of the comfort of fellow feeling,” she writes, “is war.”

Dombek’s study of our fascination with the new selfishness leads her to spend lots of time with self-help books and websites that deal with matters like how to love someone who can’t love you back and how to seduce as many partners as possible. She punctuates her survey of thinkers and pop culture with asides about her boyfriend, waiting for subways and living in Brooklyn. These digressions, for me, were mostly of marginal interest, not saying enough about either the writer or her concerns. She is sharp when seeing through puffed-up social scientists who know how to find what they are looking for (and publicize it), but she agonizes about her own choice of subject: “Any book you write is its own asylum, but a book about narcissism is like the padded cell inside the asylum.” Really? This is a short book, but maybe she should have taken more breaks.

Labeling others as narcissistic may merely be an expression of our frustration that they don’t really get us. “The selfishness of others is the feeling of your dependence revealed, as their gaze turns away,” Dombek writes. If they don’t understand us, she perceptively points out, we label them narcissists to show they are incapable of trying. She knows that our embrace of the idea of narcissism is a symptom of other things going on in our culture, but I don’t think she’s figured out why we are so enamored of the new selfishness right now. She probably started her book before Trump began to dominate politics and the media, when self-centered teenagers and bad boyfriends seemed the most important (and amusing) examples of narcissism. Alas, while writing this book in her padded cell, she has been overtaken by a very perilous turn in the history of American narcissism.

Has our overuse of the concept of narcissism made us more vulnerable to the wounded megalomania of a Trump? What’s the connection between the contemporary politics of resentment and the new selfishness? Today’s American attraction to an ultra-irritable would-be strongman is more important than our perennial griping about selfishness in young people and our exes. Maybe Dombek will turn to such issues in her next essay. Meanwhile, there’s a very real and very dangerous narcissist on the loose.

THE SELFISHNESS OF OTHERS

An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism

By Kristin Dombek

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 150 pp. $13 paper.

David Knapp ’49 Making Alma Mater Proud!

August 16, 2016August 11, 2016 by Michael S. Roth '78

This summer our daughter Sophie sent me a picture of a “cool guy” she saw at the Pride Parade in New York City. I was so surprised to see it was my friend David Knapp ’49.

Dave Knapp '49 marching for equality — Dave Knapp ’49 marching for equality

I sent the picture to Dave, and this is some of what he told me:

For the third year in a row we (Scouts For Equality) have been selected to march at the head of the Parade behind the NYC Governor, Mayor, and the owner of the Pulse Night Club in Orlando as well as carry the Color Guard. Usually they rotate the lead unit every year. Last year we decided to ask 50 Eagle Scouts, gay and straight, to each carry a state flag. I felt so happy and proud to be officially back in the Boy Scouts at 89 and to be promoting both Scouting and GLBTQ civil rights…I passionately believe that we need the values and programs of Scouting more now than at any time in its 106 year history and that a GOOD Scout program with good leadership offers lifetime skills, leadership training and friendships no other program has. I also think that if every boy were in Scouting we would have a better country—at least more honesty and integrity. End of my sermon!

Dave has been a passionate advocate for equity and inclusion at Wesleyan and beyond. I am so grateful for his support of alma mater (particularly our financial aid program) and salute his civic engagement.

UPDATE from Dave:

A thought- I hope your daughter saw the other side of my sign in the NYC Pride Parade which said “WOW! I’VE REJOINED THE BOY SCOUTS AT 89.” I kept switching the sign back and forth as I marched hoping to get the double message across to all the spectators. I hope all your BLOG watchers know that the Boy Scouts did change the policy and that I am back in Scouting actively working to rebuild the severely depleted membership…

Wesleyan at the Emmys

July 25, 2016July 24, 2016 by Michael S. Roth '78

Did you notice that Emmy Award nominations were recently released? Of course, Game of Thrones came up big, receiving 23 Emmy Award nominations. Perhaps you didn’t know that there is a Wesleyan alumnus very much at the center of things on this show. D.B. Weiss ’93 has nominations for Outstanding Drama Series (executive producer), and Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series (along with David Benioff).

Our super loyal alum and former trustee Bradley Whitford ’81 was nominated for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series (Transparent). Thomas Kail ’99 has been collecting accolades on Broadway for Hamilton and other directorial triumphs. On the small screen, he was nominated for Outstanding Direction for a Variety Special (Grease). Sasha Alpert ’82 received two nominations as a producer: Born This Way (Outstanding Unstructured Reality Program), and Project Runway (Outstanding Reality-Competition Program). Matt Senreich ’96 is an executive producer on Robot Chicken, which was nominated for Outstanding Short Form Animated Program.

We are a small school, but do we ever have a big impact on how folks tell visual stories!

Sharing Ideas at the Aspen Festival

July 20, 2016July 19, 2016 by Michael S. Roth '78

At the beginning of this month, Kari Weil and I made a brief trip to Colorado to participate in the Aspen Ideas Festival. This brings together a few thousand curious and thoughtful people to hear talks from artists, academics, politicians, writers and activists. The Aspen Institute and The Atlantic magazine put together the program, and we were both invited to talk about our work.

Kari was interviewed about her research in animal studies, starting from the incident at the Cincinnati Zoo with the gorilla Harambe. You’ll remember that a small child fell into the gorilla enclosure, and after his panicked parents alerted the zoo’s staff, Harambe was shot. The boy (whose name I still don’t know) was saved—though it will always remain unclear whether his life was really in peril. As Kari said in her Aspen conversation, the aftermath of this event tells us much about key issues in animal studies.

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I was put on different panels with college presidents and others to talk about online international educational exchanges, the challenging issues in the future of higher education, and current tensions between a commitment to free speech on campus and calls for safe spaces and trigger warnings. That last topic was considered by a rather large group of lawyers, professors, administrators, faculty and students. You can watch the session here, though I warn readers that it is long.

During that panel discussion I found my commitment to free speech challenged because I am unwilling to declare myself an “absolutist” in this regard. I have a substantial and broad commitment to freedom of expression, and, as I have written on more than one occasion, it is a fundamental value of education and democracy. I just recognize it’s not the only value at the core of these enterprises.

There are some things I don’t think a university should legitimate or dignify under the rubric of protecting speech. When we make a subject part of a debate, we legitimate it in ways that may harm the educational enterprise. Moreover, there are always things that an institution or a culture doesn’t dignify by debate. Hate speech and harassment fall into these legal or procedural categories at many places now, but there are always some things that are deemed beyond the borders of legitimate debate in a given setting. Speech is never totally free.

This is not an excuse for political correctness, nor is it a cover for censorship. I only want to recognize that we have real borders for discussion, no matter what our abstract commitment to freedom. Yale Law School professor Stephen Carter and I took different approaches to this question, as reported here.

Today, we see an accelerating coarsening of political discourse, as topics that inspire hate and violence are legitimated by political candidates and would be revolutionaries alike. To refuse to dignify discourses of despicable racism and terror with an educational platform is not an abdication of one’s commitment to speech but a recognition that speech always takes place in a context, in a culture.

These are complex matters, to be sure, and I certainly do recognize that the best way to think them through requires freedom of expression. It also requires a recognition of the rights of those who participate in the conversation. Happily we are able to protect all these things at Wesleyan.

One of my favorite moments at Aspen was saying hello to Governor John Hickenlooper ’74, MA ’80, Hon. ’10. This great force for good things has just published a memoir, The Opposite of Woe, with plenty of interesting stories about Wesleyan in the 1970s and politics over the last 20 years. A wonderful read! (Learn more in this interview with Hickenlooper in Wesleyan magazine, and this Careers by Design podcast).

Celebrating Chevalier Andrew Curran on Bastille Day

July 15, 2016July 14, 2016 by Michael S. Roth '78

It’s July 14th, the perfect time to celebrate Andrew Curran, Wesleyan’s most recently honored Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académique. The Order of Academic Palms was founded in 1808 by Napoleon Bonaparte to award devotion and accomplishment in the areas of teaching, scholarship and research. Andy is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities, and a valued member of the Romance Languages and Literature Department. He also works in the history of science and cultural history more generally.

Below are the remarks delivered at the French Embassy earlier this year when Andy was honored. Happy Bastille Day!

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I believe that when we confer on you an award that recognizes and celebrates knowledge, the significance is twofold. There is, on one hand, your status as an eminent Professor of French Literature at Wesleyan University, where you have been the Dean of Arts and Humanities as well. With a long list of awards and fellowships, ranging from Mellon Foundation grants to the James Clifford Prize, your remarkable credentials would certainly be enough to merit the Palmes Académiques honor.

But we must also consider, on the other hand, the frequent subject of your study.

You have spent much of your academic career researching and analyzing one of the greatest champions of knowledge and education. This is, of course, Denis Diderot. The founder of the modern encyclopedia, Diderot strove to make comprehensive knowledge accessible to the everyman. He believed that education was essential for distinguishing human from animal, and that knowledge was key for liberating man from the narratives imposed by authority. Even today, this message is enormously meaningful.

Your study of Diderot is vast, uncovering his rich philosophy and his prolific writings. Through your work, Diderot is shown to be a distinctive voice in an age of many great thinkers. You highlight Diderot’s secularism and challenge to the political establishment, which predated later phenomenon in French society.

You publicly advocated for Diderot’s legacy in 2013 when you voiced your support for his remains to be relocated to the Pantheon. In an Op-Ed for the New York Times, you defended the singularity of Diderot’s philosophy, writing that, “More so than the deists Voltaire and Rousseau, Diderot embodied the most progressive wing of Enlightenment thought, a position that stemmed from his belief that skepticism in all matters was ‘the first step toward truth.’ ” Your engagement with Diderot continues into the present: you currently sit on the review board of the academic journal Diderot Studies, and you have a forthcoming book entitled Diderot: The Art of Thinking Freely.

As much as you admire the Enlightenment, you are not blind to the problematic and contradictory theories sometimes espoused by the philosophes. You have written several papers and a book on the concept of “monstrosity” in Diderot’s world, and its physical, moral and even literary forms. Indeed, the “otherness” and imperfection of monstrosity creates many questions for the Enlightenment, because it raises the issue of the laws of nature, and how these laws can be reconciled with things that appear to violate them. In your study, you show how this contrast fits into Diderot’s materialist vision, and the problems it raises.

The categories and classifications in Diderot’s encyclopedia, and the subject of “otherness,” have also led you to an unorthodox yet fascinating topic: how Enlightenment thinkers conceived of “race”. You highlight the fascination with Africa during the Enlightenment, and the fixation on what was called “blackness.” Through your research, we can understand the results of this interest, including the violent history of racial classification.

You uncover the very impetus behind the interest in racial difference. Through comprehensive and critical study, you reveal the intense racial biases among our progressive philosophes, caught between a belief in the universal rights for all men and the perceived inferiority of some men compared to others. Your work sheds light on the contradictory ideas on race that became widespread even among the greatest intellectuals, and for some, created a justification for slavery. In a world still grappling with race relations and its colonial legacy, your work has been justly noted for its relevance. In 2013, your book The Anatomy of Blackness won a Choice Outstanding Book Award, and received the recognition of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in 2012.

As a professor, you have created opportunities for students to pursue their own cutting-edge research. On two occasions, you served as resident director of the Vassar-Wesleyan Program in Paris, an immersive program that helps students encounter French academic institutions as well as French life. At Wesleyan, you have taught classes on everything from the French nineteenth-century novel to Diderot to exoticism, and you do not hesitate to point out overlaps between the different fields.

Diderot once said, “Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.” Dr. Curran, your passion for knowledge and discovery has led you to complex and unprecedented work on Diderot and beyond. It is my honor to present you with this award.

Andrew Curran, au nom du Gouvernement Français, je vous fais Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académique.

UPDATE:

By now, we all know something about the horrific end to Bastille Day in Nice. We have checked in with our Wesleyan students in France, and we share the grief and outrage of those affected by the attack. Along with the compassion for those victimized by these and other atrocities, we must find the will, courage and intelligence to defeat those who would use murder to create terror.

On What Matters

July 11, 2016July 11, 2016 by Michael S. Roth '78

Too often I have written blog posts about tragedies, violence, injustice. From attacks in other parts of the world to devastation right here in the USA, I have expressed sorrow, anger—and often a feeling of solidarity with those who have suffered, are suffering. Readers have pointed out that my compassion, like other forms of attention, is selective. There are plenty of injustices that have gone unremarked in this space, either because of my own ignorance or my judgments about what I should be writing about in this Roth on Wesleyan blog.

I have followed the news reports and commentaries closely over the last week. What horror unfolds before us! The brutal killings by police officers in Minnesota and Louisiana and the vicious murders of police officers in Dallas that followed have underscored how violence can destroy individual lives while shaking communities to the core. I don’t have any wisdom of my own to offer at this painful, confusing time, but I thought I’d pass along a few of the thoughts I’ve come across recently that seemed helpful.

Michael Eric Dyson, professor and social critic, writes searingly in “Death in Black and White“:

The nation as a whole feels powerless now. A peaceful protest turned into the scene of a sniper attack. Day in and day out, we feel powerless to make our black lives matter. We feel powerless to make you believe that our black lives should matter. We feel powerless to keep you from killing black people in front of their loved ones. We feel powerless to keep you from shooting hate inside our muscles with well-choreographed white rage.

Former police captain and Brooklyn borough president Eric L. Adams writes:

I hear those saying the time just for talk is over—and I agree. Talk, and the greater freedoms of speech and expression that it encompasses, are national imperatives that should deliver a more righteous tomorrow. But the next step after talk is not violence, it is concrete action.

Action means common-sense gun reform. Time and again, this has been stonewalled by a do-nothing Congress, which has helped turn a ban on high-capacity assault weapons into a controversial issue. This has to change. Action means urgent attention to the mental health epidemic that plagues our nation. This epidemic is blind to a person’s background and profession, yet unattended it can distort the honest, passionate rhetoric of protest into the delusional hate of dangerous radicalization.

Wesleyan professor, anthropologist, and performer Gina Athena Ulysse, as usual, gives us much to think about in her Pedagogies of the Traumatized:

We can’t keep running away from the past. Besides, social media has assured we can only run so far; the brutality that used to happen in private is now ever so public. My optimism wanes and my patience continues to be tried with each new extra judicial killing, each exoneration. Each one is more confirmation of the deep rootedness of our inequality. We bear the weight of history so unequally. It is written on our bodies and etched in the color of our skin. Human chattel. Property. Slaves. That is the undue burden, the inequity we live with, that simply cannot be undone unconsciously. Its transformation, if that (I am not naïve), requires so much more than will. To bring about a modicum of change we must not only intentionally attempt, but also be determined, to shift. It will not happen par hazard. Because history has seen to it that the exchange, use, and sign value ascribed to Black lives remains unequal to that of Whites. We are differentially positioned and invested.

Yale philosopher Chris LeBron recently noted that the differences among us have less to do with the facts of any specific encounter than with our will to change how we live. Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen asks whether we can hold ourselves together as a people—”we cannot be a people and be at war with ourselves.” And Gina Athena Ulysse ends her post by asking: “Where is your outrage as we all bear witness to this moment?”

We can turn our witnessing and our outrage toward justice, justice informed by education as well as generosity and care. This will mean making our own campus a place of greater equity and inclusion as we engage as citizens to end this awful cycle of racism and violence.