Michael S. Roth '78

The Association of American Colleges and Universities today awarded Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters the Walter Ness Award for a book that “best illuminates the goals and practices of a contemporary liberal education.” This morning I heard stirring speeches from outgoing AAC&U president Carol Geary Schneider and Freman Hrabowski, the president of University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Both have done so much to foster equity and inclusion in higher education.

I am very honored to receive this award and post the AAC&U’s press release below:

Yesterday I had the treat of watching some great competition at the Freeman Athletic Center. We were hosting the Little Three Track and Field contests, and there were plenty of great efforts. On the women’s side, Allegra Fils-Aime ’19 was a stand out with a first-place finish in the 200 meter dash, while also placing third in the triple jump. Senior Alexis Walker finished the 60 meter dash in second-place. She also won first place in the long jump.

The Cardinal relay team captured first-place in the 4 x 400 with the team of Sarah Swenson ’18, Ananya Subrahmanian ’18, Alexandra Dibrindisi ’19 and Jennifer Aguiar ’18. The 4 x 800 team, which consisted of Aida Julien ’18, Isabella Reilly ’19 and Claudia Schatz ’19, and senior Syndey Cogswell, finished second overall.

Senior Kiley Kennedy tied for second place in the pole vault. The Cardinals captured second and third place in the shot put event as well, with senior Ellie Martin coming in second, and Katie Maehl ’19 placing third.

On the men’s side there was also some great performances. It’s a pleasure to congratulate senior Agbon Edomwonyi, who took home two first-place finishes with wins in the shot put and the weight throw.

I also got to see part of the contest in which the men’s hockey team fight back to a 2-2 tie with Colby. James Kline ’17 and frosh Andy Espinoza scored goals. The women’s basketball team looked great as they rolled past Trinity, 70-46. Brenna Diggins ’17 scored a game-high 18 points and pulled in five rebounds. Olivia Gorman ’19 was a scoring machine with 13 points in just 14 minutes, and was spectacular off the bench in the second half. It was an impressive team effort as the Cardinals got their first NESCAC win.

Winter session students, thesis writers and athletes have already been working hard, and soon we’ll be joined on campus by the rest of the student body. Go Wes!

Gerard Koeppel ’79 is an unusual writer. He combines passion, wit, intelligence and tons of research into history books that are interesting to a very wide range of readers. He has published books on the making of the Erie canal (Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire) and about how New York city has developed mechanisms to deliver enough fresh water to support its population (Water for Gotham: A History). Over the break I’ve been reading City on a Grid: How New York Became New York, which examines the architectural and urban planning history of New York City.

Gerard shows that in the early 1800s a small commission imposed a grid on the development of the city so as to create rectangle after rectangle, right angle after right angle. There were some who argued that this was tyranny (these men “would have cut down the seven hills of Rome”), but in many ways the future of the city was laid out by that early commission. “Streets and avenues were drawn on the plan with complete disregard to natural features, and, over the decades…and natural features were simply cut down, filled in, and paved over.”

Gerard will be talking about his book and reading from it at Wesleyan on February 18th at 4:30 pm in Usdan 108.

Toward the end of his fascinating book, Gerard writes “It is very hard to design the future. It is easier to understand the past.” His understanding of New York’s gridded past should inform any plans to create a more sustainable city for tomorrow.

Today, I sent the following message to the Wesleyan community:

Dear friends,

At the end of last semester I indicated we would be creating a task force to explore the establishment of a multicultural resource center as part of our broader effort to improve equity and inclusion on campus. This task force will be tri-chaired by Professor Gina Athena Ulysse, Shardonay Pagett ’18, and Antonio Farias, Vice President for Equity and Inclusion. Their initial report is expected next month and final recommendations by May 1. You will be able to find updates on their work and related events, including a community dialogue to be held early this semester, at http://equity.wesleyan.edu. This is important work, and I thank the members of this task force for their participation.

It need hardly be said that making our campus more equitable and inclusive is a communal goal and must be a communal effort. In the course of this work we will be challenged to truly listen to differing viewpoints and to learn from them. In 2016 let’s each and every one of us do what we can—be it personal, political, or intellectual—to contribute to equity and inclusion at Wesleyan.

Michael S. Roth
President

This past weekend the Wall Street Journal published a group of articles on the coming year. They asked me to participate in this journalistic  symposium, and I offered an optimistic perspective on a “comeback” for liberal education. I cross-post it here.

Wesleyan’s president argues that 2016 should be the year we resist efforts to steer higher education toward pseudo-practicality

After a decade in which broad, conceptual learning was often bashed, 2016 will see a resurgent commitment in higher education to a pragmatic liberal-arts education. Not only traditional classrooms but also new pedagogical tools like MOOCs (massive open online courses) will be used more extensively to teach everything from Great Books to transformational historical trends to landmarks of scientific thinking. In 2016, liberal education, American-style, will flourish.

Many liberal-arts colleges have been under extraordinary duress in recent years, while many big public universities, when not just focused on specialized research, seem to have abandoned broad, contextual learning in favor of vocational majors, TV-friendly athletics and cultivating a party atmosphere for millennial customers and their hovering parents.

But liberal education in America has been under pressure before, and this is one of those moments when it can emerge stronger than ever. The stakes in 2016 are high, from a national political debate desperate for critical thinking to an economy eager for innovation. This should be the year we find the courage to resist those who want to steer higher education in the direction of a pseudo-practicality. A strictly utilitarian education produces graduates who will conform to the status quo, but in our period of extraordinary change, the status quo almost immediately becomes obsolete.

Liberal-arts education today can be pragmatic, empowering students with potent ways of dealing with the issues they will face at work and in life. In the years ahead, liberal learning will link engineering with design and economics, the arts with computer science, the study of philosophy with building more just institutions. From Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois to Jane Addams, Americans have recognized that a broad, contextual education protects against mindless tyranny and haughty privilege. In 2016, we can recognize again that liberal learning in the American tradition isn’t only training; it is an invitation to think for oneself—and to act in concert with others to face serious challenges and create far-reaching opportunities.

I sent this message to the Wesleyan community earlier this week:

Dear friends,

As I reflect on 2015, I find a number of ongoing challenges but also much to be proud of — and be inspired by. I see many in our campus community who proved unafraid to take risks for the sake of positive outcomes, who demanded much of others for the sake of learning, who put themselves out there for the sake of others. At Wesleyan, boldness, rigor and practical idealism can be found in classrooms, in athletics, in protests, in labs, in performances. “We are all educators,” I’ve said to staff on many occasions this year, for they, like our marvelous faculty, create the conditions for this kind of education. And I saw boldness, rigor, and practical idealism at work in our alumni as well: in how they lead their lives, contribute to their communities, support alma mater.

The Wesleyan I’ve seen in 2015 is a place of exuberance and reflection, a place of compassionate solidarity. We had our challenges but accomplished much; for details please see my update on our progress toward the goals set forth in our framework for planning, Wesleyan 2020.

Our THIS IS WHY fundraising campaign continues to surpass expectations and now has just six months to go! My thanks to all who contributed to Wesleyan this year — through your hard work and through your support. Go Wes!

Sincerely,

Michael S. Roth

President

As we get to the end of the semester, I find myself revisiting some of its highlights. One such moment was when coaches Mark Woodworth and Joe Reilly visited my office just before Homecoming. They were coming by to present me with NESCAC Championship Rings from the baseball team and men’s basketball team. The record of excellence for both teams is most impressive. Baseball has become a conference powerhouse, and last year the basketball team had an extraordinary run through the tournament to emerge with our first NESCAC title in the sport.

At Homecoming we had the occasion to celebrate other NESCAC champions, including the amazing tennis star, Eudice Chong ’18, who went on to a national championship. These student athletes do us proud!

On campus, we all know that athletics isn’t confined to those who win championships or even those who suit up for varsity sports. Every day you can find students, faculty and staff on the ice, tracks, bikes, courts, fields, sailboats, horses….and (speaking for myself) stairmasters! We cheer one another on, and, sometimes, go beyond what we had imagined we could accomplish.

Even our varsity athletes get a break after finals, but they will be back in competition weeks before the new semester begins. Let’s cheer them on!

This week The Hollywood Reporter has a great story about Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies Jeanine Basinger. New York Times film critic and Wesleyan’s Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism, A.O. Scott puts it this way: “I took a job teaching at Wesleyan as an excuse to hang out and talk about movies with Jeanine. There’s nothing she doesn’t know.” The article focuses on Jeanine’s amazing group of former students who have gone on to extraordinary careers in the film industry — and they couldn’t get everybody!  “When I started teaching at Wesleyan,” she writes, “I realized the students were fabulous — they had so much imagination, intelligence, originality,” she says. “I kept thinking to myself, ‘Why don’t these people work in the film business?’ I told them, ‘Somebody gets those jobs. Why not you?’ And I started encouraging them to become the people they have become.

(Photos courtesy of Smallz + Raskind)

The op-ed below ran in the Washington Post and was reprinted on The Huffington Post.

‘Tis the season to write disparaging commentaries on college students. They are coddled, some say, others say they don’t understand the value of free speech, while still others predict the demise of American higher education as a whole because of a lack of openness to new ideas.

I have written on why free speech is so crucial to any educational institution but also about why the biggest threat to freedom of speech isn’t on college campuses. I have described why I’m tired of reading about pampered college students, and now I am moved to hit the keyboard again as I encounter columnists who see political correctness run amok, or who simply can’t stand the fact that groups only recently welcomed onto elite campuses aren’t just grateful for being admitted. I work with students everyday, and I have had protesters at my office, and I don’t see their realities reflected in public discourse.

I agree whole heartedly with Fareed Zakaria’s recent argument that learning is most powerful when people with very different points of view engage in conversation that brings out those differences for reflective consideration. Like him, I am a great admirer of W.E.B. Du Bois’s commitment to liberal education, reflected in his comment: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not…Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas. . . I summon Aristotle and Aurelius . . . and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”

The great African American intellectual Du Bois could summon these great figures as equals, but on campuses today students of color still find plenty of “scorn” and “condescension.” For the backlash against anti-racist efforts is well underway, usually under the rubric of not giving into “political correctness.” In 1829, David Walker, a free American black, put the real reason in words that should still resonate: “for colored people to acquire learning in this country, makes tyrants quake and tremble on their sandy foundation.”

Walker wrote when slavery was still legal in the United States, but the struggle for equal rights is far from over. In the realm of scholarship, we have only begun to turn back centuries of blindness (and worse) toward cultures that didn’t fit into the standard narratives of American unity at home and exceptionalism vis à vis other nations. Do we need any more evidence of the persistence of the mainstream account than hearing that people are shocked, really shocked, that Woodrow Wilson didn’t just have what historians like to call “the prejudices of his day” but that he was an aggressive, virulent racist bent on turning back the gains of Reconstruction! Is it really such a surprise that at Princeton, far more diverse than in Wilson’s day, not everyone feels equally welcome at the school of international studies that bears his name?

When students support Black Lives Matter or take classes in Africana Studies, or Asian American Studies or Women’s Studies, they are not just “studying themselves;” they are studying groups of people who have been systematically kept out of the mainstream narrative of our culture’s history. Sure, the narrative has been changing, and now one can find English departments with a much expanded canon and history departments that look at the struggles of diverse groups in different places and times. But these changes have taken place because of the efforts of activist students and their faculty allies.

And contrary to what you might have read, students taking ethnic study classes are also engaged in other academic pursuits. At Wesleyan more than three-quarters of the students in our versions of ethnic and gender studies have a second major. These students aren’t just trying to reinforce their identities; they are trying to expand their horizons in just the way one would expect at an institution devoted to liberal education.

I write these sentences as a university president, but I also write them as a guy who teaches a European Great Books survey course. I teach mostly the dead white males. In my classes we talk about Rousseau and Marx, Kant and Nietzsche, Mill and Darwin, Flaubert and Woolf, Freud and Butler. And we deal with politics and religion, equality and revolution, gender and evolutionary biology. I have always had large classes and in 30 years of teaching have never been asked for a trigger warning.

We also talk about thinkers who form part of a conservative tradition, like Smith and Burke, Tocqueville and Strauss. I do think I should do more on this latter trajectory. Although I am a person of the Left, like many commentators I worry about the political tilt of many humanities and social science departments. We need to support our conservative students and confront our liberal ones with the deep conservative bodies of thinking.

Does that mean I, too, see the specter of political correctness haunting college campuses across the country? No, I see political correctness as a charismatic bogeyman with strange powers to titillate liberal and conservative writers alike. Sure, there are groups that form around common values and ideas, and sometimes a group can be close-minded. But I see vigorous discussion within the faculty about ideas that matter, and I hear plenty of students rebelling against the notion that young people all think alike. For example, on my left-leaning campus, there is more religious practice than there has been in years, and we have had forceful discussions with large groups of students about everything from the role of fraternities to the economic/political possibilities of a carbon tax.

Of course, some people do shout down others, and sometimes a group of students will want to retreat to a place with like-minded friends. This has always happened, whether such spaces were called “safe” or not. That the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal echoes a gaggle of columnists in calling demonstrations and posters “political intimidation” would be merely curious if the editors and writers didn’t also claim to be protectors of free speech.

Don’t get me wrong, because there is so much intense discussion these days, campuses can be challenging places. Conversations about race and about the economy, about bias and sexual assault, about jobs and the shrinking middle class…all these topics stimulate strong emotions, intense language, and, sometimes bruised feelings. I hope there are other places in America today where these arguments are taking place among people from different backgrounds, and where the conclusions aren’t set in advance. However painful this may be at times, I’m sure glad these conversations are happening on our campuses.

At a time when major presidential candidates demonize difference, and when attackers respond to groups they’ve been inspired to hate with terrorism, let’s recognize the constructive value of ongoing debate and that politicized campuses remain places of confrontation and of real learning.