Boston Globe – Roth on Wesleyan

Earlier this month the Boston Globe published an op-ed I wrote based on my remarks to the Class of 2023. I thought I’d share it here.

As the school year draws to a close, it’s easy to see that teaching and learning are no simple matters these days. Questions around education have become more urgent in the face of the powerful forces of discrimination and censorship at work in our country.

Of course teaching has always faced obstacles. Throughout the modern period, theories of education have been hotly debated, and as secular governments assumed responsibility for schooling, educators focused on preparing independent thinkers who could also be free citizens. But it’s always been a paradox that one can really learn independence from another.Today many are asking whether schools are truly helping students think for themselves or only indoctrinating them into the latest campus orthodoxies. Others have noted that while higher education can lead to inventions that benefit society as a whole, it can also create self-serving justifications for the inequalities associated with economic development. Educational thinkers in America have been responding to such questions for a long time. Real students, said Ralph Waldo Emerson, are provoked away from conformity; they think aversively. Freedom is tied to learning and neither is just an intellectual matter. They are bound together by living with an intensity opposed to convention.

W.E.B. Du Bois didn’t need Emerson to tell him that a real education involved an intense opposition to convention. As a Black intellectual, Du Bois pursued learning with a steeliness forged by the racist opposition to his talents and ambitions. As a student, he aimed for freedom through empowerment. Then, as he made his way in the world, he in turn used his education to empower others who knew they must change the world around them to have any chance at real opportunity and freedom. His contemporary, JaneAddams, who worked with poor immigrants in Chicago, also recognized that a profound education should be put in the service of the most vulnerable. She rejected facile and performative critical thinking in favor of what she called the sympathetic imagination — a faculty that led to understanding perspectives and experiences very different from one’s own. This was at the core of her rethinking of what it meant to be a student or a teacher.

Emerson, Du Bois, and Addams remind us that the most effective teachers are the ones preparing students for more than replicating the world as it is. They are empowering people to intervene to protect those who are treated unjustly and to choose with discernment those who would govern. In other words, teachers are contributing to civic life.

Strong students make better teachers, and both help create better citizens. I have had the good fortune of working with students whose seriousness and joy, playfulness and purpose have illuminated for me the very subjects I was trained to teach. Working with students has also made me more attentive to the concerns of others. By exploring the complexities of the world, students and teachers practice making connections that are intellectual and affective. And today, when parochialism is encouraged under the guise of solidarity, it’s more important than ever for schools, colleges, and universities to promote citizenship by helping students increase their powers of aversive thinking, critical feeling, and of the sympathetic imagination.

Strong teachers often provoke powerful emotions, and the best teach in ways that eliminate the need for their teaching: “Your educators cannot go beyond being your liberators,” philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche underscored in 1874. To be a good art teacher, said John Baldessari about a century later, means knowing when to get out of the way. The goal of the teacher is to help the student be more than a spectator, more than a consumer of lessons.

Teachers can help students get to a place where it is more likely that they’ll find modes of feeling and thinking with which they are at home and which they can share with others.Part of being free, part of political participation and of leaving one’s childish immaturity behind, is finding that new home. Long after official graduations, many students remain enormously grateful to the gifted educators who opened up possibilities of inquiry and appreciation that might otherwise have never been discovered — teachers who also recognized the right time to get out of the way. It’s not just that teachers know subjects that the student aspires to understand; it’s also that through their own advanced studies they have developed habits of paying attention, analysis, and openness that students want for themselves.

Teachers point students toward experiences and discoveries that become available through collaborative exploration. We must be on our guard against those who are afraid of that exploration; we must stand up against those who fear fluidity, who ban books, and who are frightened by free expression and creative transformation. Practicing education is like practicing democracy — both are collaborative, experimental paths of improvement.

I’ve been teaching for over 40 years, and I’d like to think I’ve remained a student throughout this time. In the courageous company of my fellow learners, I’m encouraged to believe that society may be able to reject the cynical status quo that mobilizes rage, that we may be able to build a politics and a culture of compassionate solidarity rather than one of fear and divisiveness. Our education, the ability to productively learn from others, should help people shape the future lest it be shaped by those for whom justice and change, generosity and equality, diversity and tolerance, are too threatening.

When we work with others, when we are open to learn from them across our differences, we will feel the power and promise of our education as it helps us tackle the enormous challenges ahead while finding joy in creating new possibilities.

Michael S. Roth is president of Wesleyan University. His new book, “The Student: A Short History,” will be published in September.

As we are about to head into November, we are one week from Election Day on November 8. I trust by now Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff have a plan for voting, and I imagine many of you are working on behalf of a candidate or issue of your choice. Readers of this blog know I believe that learning through civic practices is a crucial dimension of a liberal education, and we are doing what we can to bring the educative dimensions of democracy to our campus (and to other campuses). This is an urgent project.

A few weeks ago, I published an essay in The Boston Globe about the importance of these midterm elections. I cross-post it here. So much is at stake right now. You can make a difference.

College mission: Encourage diverse views but protect democracy

This fall many college leaders will struggle with how to navigate an intense election season in which the polarization of the country is seemingly everywhere. Higher education officials usually try to maintain their nonpartisan status, both for legal reasons (as employees of tax-exempt not-for-profits) and for educational ones. Our job as administrators and teachers is not to tell students what to think about politics but to help them formulate their own views while considering the best available information and most thoughtful perspectives.

In the summer of 2016, I broke from this tradition because the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump represented not just a political choice for teachers and students but a clear threat to our educational mission. At the time, I wrote that he was “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.”

We now know more about that. We know that Trump encouraged a coup in the wake of his electoral defeat and that he continues to advocate for the dismantling of our democracy. He is backing candidates who proudly claim that if they lose the election, it has to have been rigged, candidates who want to hinder from voting those unlikely to support them. And how can we not be alarmed by the apparent readiness of Trump and his allies to remove from the federal workforce anyone who disagrees with their approach to America First. As Trump said at a rally last March, “We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States.” Known as “Schedule F,” it means tens of thousands of people could be in danger of losing their jobs if Trump is elected in 2024. Positions of power would be filled not on the basis of competence but of fidelity.

This is not about policy differences but about the mechanisms and values of our representative system. And that’s why educators at all levels must speak out to defend democracy. We must also speak out to defend those who have already become the victims of creeping authoritarianism. Vulnerable poor and working people, members of marginalized groups, and immigrants are already being harassed by would-be strongmen and their cronies. Texas and Florida are only the most obvious examples where governors emulate Trump’s demagogue playbook by scapegoating trans people and migrants to energize the base emotions of some of their strongest supporters. After the election of 2016, some campus leaders vowed to protect immigrants who felt threatened by Trump’s election, and now we must remind politicians that schools and colleges have a responsibility to educate all students.

As we defend the processes of democracy and the most vulnerable members of our community, we must also protect the rights of all students on campus. This includes ensuring that those who identify as conservatives are not further marginalized by our efforts to protect the democratic process. We must not confuse the rejection of authoritarianism with a partisan suite of policy judgments about domestic and foreign affairs. The defense of democracy always includes the defense of one’s right to express views other than the majority’s. We must not encourage campus authoritarianism just because there seems to be a local consensus about what it means to be progressive.

A broad, inclusive college education is so valuable because through it we learn to reason together. We learn to engage in ongoing conversations with people different from ourselves and whose views we might find objectionable. This serves the country as a whole by creating habits of open-minded discussion and practiced, free inquiry. The authoritarianism we see growing in the United States and around the world pulls apart the very fabric of liberal education and would make it impossible for us to continue this work.

We in higher education must energetically cultivate democratic values—including freedom of expression, rights to representation, and the protection of the vulnerable—at home on our campuses. And we must take a stand against the would-be strongmen who threaten these values in our country and beyond. As educators, we should encourage our students and colleagues to join us in fighting for basic democratic rights. And should that fight be lost in America and the capacity to reason together be rendered pointless (or even persecuted), what then becomes of a genuine education? The nature and mission of our colleges and universities will change fundamentally. That so many are demanding just that should be warning enough.