Liberal Education

Dynamic Pluralism in Chaotic Times

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This morning I sent the following message to the campus community.

Dear friends,

It is so good to be back on campus with colleagues and students. I’ve met with my class a couple of times, and I still get a thrill teaching in the new Frank Center for Public Affairs. Early in the morning, Kari, Lola, and I see athletes heading to practice before dawn; there are art openings in the afternoon; and I’m told the libraries are abuzz late into the night. Wes is alive and well.

Yet looking around the world, we recognize these are anxious times. And sad times, too. Wednesday night’s plane accident in Washington, D.C., reminds us how suddenly an experience we take for granted can become a tragedy. In the chaos of this past week many of us have realized how much we, and our institutions, took for granted our dependence on the government. From Pell Grants and student loans to research support and so much more, universities across the country have relied on governmental support while maintaining their autonomy to teach and learn as they see fit. Freedom of expression—with respect to artistic practice or scholarly research—has long been compatible with government support. This has been good for the country, for our students and teachers—and for the wider world of learning.

Internationalization has also been good for learning. Each year Wesleyan welcomes hundreds of students from around the world, along with dozens of teachers, researchers, and artists. These visitors, along with immigrants to the United States, make an enormous contribution for which we are grateful.

If we hadn’t fully realized it before, we surely now recognize that elections have consequences. But that doesn’t mean that we should be silent in the face of intimidation, scapegoating, and violations of the rule of law. As I’ve said in the past, the University will do everything it can to protect the most vulnerable among us. We remain committed to principles of non-discrimination, including equal protection, regardless of gender, national origin, or citizenship. I am appalled by the attacks on trans people and immigrants. Defending the most vulnerable among us is a duty.

Our university has for decades worked to enhance the educational power of diversity, and we continue to do so. While powerful forces have demonized a caricature of DEI, we remain steadfast in our efforts to treat everyone in our community fairly while helping them feel they belong. These efforts are key to the dynamic pluralism that we seek to cultivate.

In the coming weeks and months, you may have questions about how you or how Wesleyan will be affected by changes in governmental policies. Please reach out to Human Resources or to Academic and Class Deans for help. My office stands at the ready to do what it can.

Wesleyan is almost 200 years old and has seen turbulent times before. We will navigate the current situation consistent with our mission to create “a diverse, energetic community of students, faculty, and staff who think critically and creatively and who value independence of mind and generosity of spirit.” It is so good to be in your company!

Sincerely,

Michael S. Roth
President

Moving Toward that Goal with MLK

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Today we celebrate the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. King never aspired to perfection, but he never let his personal trials, or the obstacles created by defenders of White supremacy, derail his efforts to live a life of practical idealism. That life and that idealism continue to inspire millions.   

King was deeply committed to pragmatic liberal education. He took for granted that students needed to acquire skills that others would find useful, but he also believed that students should be enhancing their capacity to participate in the political and intellectual culture of their time. Through thoughtful participation, we would learn to distinguish the lies told by the powerful from the path for genuine empowerment of all citizens. “To save man from the morass of propaganda,” he wrote while an undergraduate himself, “is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.”

King also knew that a narrow education could do more harm than good. When we learn just to get things done, we may find ourselves efficiently destroying the welfare of others. “The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals,” he wrote in that same student essay. We know, as we say in our University’s strategic plan, that “education can reinforce privilege and divisions, or it can be a vehicle for social mobility and cohesion.”

Image of Martin Luther King, Jr. with Wesleyan students
In addition to King’s public lectures and sermons, the civil rights leader would also speak with smaller groups of students in more personal settings. Here he is speaking at a College of Social Sciences talk.

At liberal arts institutions, we believe wholeheartedly in holistic education – and we recognize there are many ways to deliver that form of learning to different kinds of students. Students and faculty put together a plan for the “education of the whole person” that should last a lifetime.  As we say in our Mission Statement: “The University seeks to build a diverse, energetic community of students, faculty, and staff who think critically and creatively and who value independence of mind and generosity of spirit.”

This year MLK Day falls just as the new semester begins at many universities. It also falls on the first day of a new administration in Washington. I wonder what King would make of those about to take charge of the most powerful governmental apparatus in the world. Perhaps he would use the same words with which he brought his student essay on education to a close: “Be careful, brethren!”

We should all “be careful” as the federal government moves to implement some of the promises made during last year’s campaign. Vigilance is necessary as we safeguard our commitments to freedom of inquiry and expression. Energy and creativity are necessary as we “strengthen our commitment to fostering a spirit of care and belonging while increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion.” When I wrote that phrase as part of Wesleyan’s strategic plan, it seemed uncontroversial. Who could be against learning from others different from oneself? Who could oppose fairness and belonging?  

Martin Luther King Jr. speaking at a Wesleyan Commencement
“Segregation is an immoral system and it is nothing but a new form of slavery covered up with certain niceties of complexity,” King said during his 1964 Baccalaureate Address.

These days the acronym DEI has plenty of detractors, and so we must remind people why increasing access to education, while trying to ensure that all those invited to campus feel welcome, is a basic principle of liberal learning in a democratic culture. We will continue to defend that principle and the freedoms that make it possible, but we should remain open to hearing perspectives quite different from our own. We will surely fail to convince some of our interlocutors, but we should try to learn from all these conversations.

Martin Luther King, Jr. came to know better than most that movements for social change experience frustrating setbacks. Still, he wrote later in “The Power of Non-Violence” that “we have a great opportunity in America to build here a great nation, a nation where all men live together as brothers and respect the dignity and worth of all human personality. We must keep moving toward that goal.” He always recognized that resilience and hope are essential in the attempt to build the nation to which we aspire. Resilience and hope are qualities that we should bring to the new semester and to this new year. Education is our way to keep “moving toward that goal” as Dr. King saw all those years ago.

We can cultivate those qualities together. They will help us be better students – and better citizens.

And Now, Towards the Finish Line!

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As we gather in the wake of spring break, it’s good to remember that many Wesleyans have been busy these past two weeks preparing for the last half of the semester. I know that many seniors working on theses, performances and art projects didn’t get away and have been making progress on substantial pieces of work. Whether they are studying federal regulations in the government department or working to understand personal dis-regulation in psychology, they are combing through data and honing their arguments. Biologists at Wes are closer to their fruit flies than one might think possible, while physicists work with computer scientists and mathematicians on the properties of sensors. These are quite different, thank goodness, from the properties of censors, which very few of our artists have to worry about (I trust). They are making films and dance performances, writing novels and analyzing philosophical texts for ideas that might change the way we look at the world.

All of this is to say that many of us have not been on much of a break at all. Spring sports teams have been busy competing, staff here in Middletown have been preparing the campus for the new season of activities. Writers are writing, readers are reading … You get the picture. 

Speaking of pictures, here’s one of Lola on the first day of spring:

Good luck with the rest of the semester!

On Pragmatic Liberal Education

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I posted this piece a few weeks ago in the Washington Post under the title “Some see liberal arts education as elitist. Why it’s really pragmatic” (Washington Post, 2/5/2023).

At a time when misinformation grows more sophisticated and demagoguery runs rampant, the public should be able to turn to higher education for guidance. But there is declining trust in the sector, which has been embroiled in controversies ranging from its high cost, to tensions between academic freedom and religion, to questions about the role of social justice on campus. From Texas to Florida, government leaders have felt empowered to ramp up their war on universities. Critics on the left accuse universities of being the servants of neoliberal corporatism, while critics on the right view them as engines of indoctrination into world views that dismiss the lives of ordinary people. At a time when higher education should be contributing to our public lives, many of its leaders are busy playing defense, or worse, just laying low.

Colleges and universities in the United States come in a wide variety of forms, but one of their most distinctive elements is pragmatic liberal education. This form of learning — no matter what you are studying — combines the acquisition of specific skills (such as literacy and numeracy) with understanding of how those skills fit into broad contexts. Rather than being just trained how to be a cog in a machine, you are taught to understand how machines work within the systems in which they (and you) are embedded. Pragmatic liberal education in the United States has emphasized that in a diverse democracy, it is crucial that people develop the capacity to listen to those with views different from their own.

Today the relevance of that vision is being challenged on many fronts. There are those who claim that colleges are creating insular tribes adept mostly at canceling one another rather than promoting a diversity of viewpoints. Liberal learning, others argue, contributes to the divisiveness afflicting American society by reinforcing a sense of superiority — in turn, inciting righteous indignation among those who feel elites with fancy diplomas are looking down on them.

Critics are not wrong to point out that biases exist in the American academy that can lead to contempt for those who don’t play its idiosyncratic language games. They are not wrong to question whether professors are providing the tools of facile rejection under the guise of empowering critical thinking, paying lip service to academic freedom while expecting ideological or intellectual conformity. These are legitimate concerns for anyone who believes that education should liberate one from dependence on someone else’s thinking (even the teacher’s) and that learning should foster open-ended inquiry and self-reliance.

Because liberal education is a path well-trod by elites, it can also seem to be the pathway to elitism, cementing economic inequality and enabling a fortunate few to assume an attitude of haughty privilege. Selective institutions like my own take too much pride in the number of people they reject in admissions. Throughout U.S. history, writers have argued that while education was essential for a healthy democracy, it could also lead to a class of pretentious elites condescending to their fellow citizens (if they recognized them at all).

Champions of pragmatic liberal education have long recognized this issue. In the early part of the 20th century, Jane Addams, for example, saw that so-called sophisticated modes of education often stifled the ability to see things from another’s point of view. She recognized that strong thinking often became self-protective and detached from the concerns of others. She insisted on the development of empathy and the sympathetic imagination, underscoring participation in civic life as a vehicle for liberal learning that wouldn’t become parochial and elitist.

The U.S. tradition of pragmatic liberal education of which Jane Addams is a part doesn’t just want students to have read a set of sanctified Great Books. They realize that real inquiry must be tested beyond the university, and that real learning, including the study of classic works, must be relevant beyond the classroom. This American educational tradition took a bet on what pragmatist philosopher John Dewey called “practical idealism,” a bet on the value of situating learning in relation to society and the aim of contributing to its well-being.

That wager inspires students from all walks of life who choose educational paths that allow them to make unexpected connections to discover fields of inquiry of which they were unaware in high school. Students may enter higher education with very specific goals, but in large public universities and small liberal arts colleges, in historically Black colleges and universities, and in faith-based institutions, they encounter teachers who show them how to build skills while also broadening their awareness of the world around them.

I’m thinking of Kennedy Odede, who came to the United States from Kenya, and while studying social science at Wesleyan University started schools for girls in slums around Nairobi. Some of those girls are now applying to colleges in the United States. I’m thinking of Livia Cox, who studied neuroscience and trained as an emergency medical technician while an undergraduate, and who now has been awarded grant support to put her medical training into a broad public health context.

We should recognize how our campuses thrive with productive nonconformists and practical idealists who are building companies and purpose-driven organizations. On campuses today you can certainly find examples of cancel culture, but you also find faith-based groups supporting health care workers, liberal arts students working with the incarcerated, and an impressive array of young people defending the right to vote.

Higher education in the United States can be pragmatic without being conformist, and liberal education can inspire students to think for themselves in ways that include learning from people with views different from their own. A pragmatic liberal education promises to engage with issues that students will have to deal with beyond their university years; it’s more ambitious than a short-term training program. The jobs of the future and the problems confronting our world today cannot be tackled by technical specialization alone. Environmental degradation, artificial intelligence, public health, increasing inequality, international political tensions — these are complex areas that demand the kind of holistic thinking characteristic of liberal education.

Our pragmatic approach to liberal education is one of the reasons more than a million students from outside our borders flock to U.S. colleges and universities each year. Their confidence in our institutions is no replacement, though, for the trust of our fellow citizens. To strengthen that trust, we must demonstrate that our educational institutions foster open inquiry, deep research, and pragmatic approaches to the pressing problems and opportunities before us. If our colleges and universities graduate practical idealists rather than narrow-minded conformists, we will be serving our nation and the world.

How to Choose A (Our) University

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Throughout the spring, high school seniors with the acceptance letters in hand are once again visiting campuses as they try to decide where to attend college. They are trying to envision the school at which they will be most likely to thrive. Where will I learn the most, be happiest, and form friendships that will last a lifetime? How to choose? As I do each spring, I thought it might be useful to re-post my thoughts on choosing a college. We have been hosting many campus visitors, and tomorrow we begin three WesFest Fridays. I invite you to visit our Admitted Students website to learn more about Wesleyan.

In the wake of the pandemic, many students today are wondering what campus life will be like in the fall. At Wesleyan we are planning for a normal university year. Sure, we expect to continue to take health precautions, including ensuring that all students are vaccinated and boosted before they begin the semester. Of course, we will monitor the pandemic’s course throughout the coming months.

For many, the decision about where to attend college will be made on an economic basis. Which school has given the most generous financial aid package? Wesleyan is one of a small number of schools that meets the full financial need of all admitted students according to a formula developed over several years. Wesleyan has made a commitment to keep loan levels low, and we have replaced them with grants for high need families. We also offer a three-year program that allows families to save about 20 percent of their total expenses, while still earning the same number of credits.

After answering the question of which schools one can afford, how else does one decide where best to spend one’s college years? Of course, size matters.  Some students are looking for a large university in an urban setting where the city itself plays an important role in one’s education. New York and Boston, for example, are popular college destinations, but not, I suspect, for the classroom experience. If one seeks small classes and strong, personal relationships with faculty, then liberal arts schools, which pride themselves on providing rich cultural and social experiences on a residential campus, are especially compelling. You can be on a campus with a human scale and still have plenty of things to do. Wesleyan is somewhat larger than most liberal arts colleges but much smaller than the urban or land grant universities. We feel that this gives our students the opportunity to choose a broad curriculum and a variety of cultural activities on campus, while still being small enough to encourage regular, sustained relationships among faculty and students.

All the selective small liberal arts schools boast of having a faculty of scholar-teachers, of a commitment to research and interdisciplinarity, and of encouraging community and service. So what sets us apart from one another after taking into account size, location, and financial aid packages? What are students trying to see when they visit Amherst and Wesleyan, or Tufts and Pomona?

As students scan the Wesleyan website, go to chatrooms and listen to current students talk about their experiences, I hope they feel the brave exuberance and ambition of our students, the intelligence and care of our faculty, the playful yet demanding qualities of our community. I would like prospective students to get a sense of our commitment to creating a diversity in which difference is embraced and not just tolerated, and to public service that is part of one’s education and approach to life. Our students have the courage to find new combinations of subjects to study, of people to meet, of challenges to face.

Whatever college or university students choose, I hope they get three things out of their education: discovering what they love to do; getting better at it; learning to share it with others. I explain a little bit more about that in this talk to admitted students a few years ago:

We all know that Wesleyan is hard to get into, but even in the group of highly selective schools, Wes is not for everybody. We aspire to be a community committed to boldness as well as to rigor, to idealism as well as to effectiveness. Whether in the sciences, arts, humanities or social sciences, our faculty and students are dedicated to explorations that invite originality as well as collaboration. The scholar-teacher model is at the heart of our curriculum. Our faculty are committed to teaching and to shaping their disciplines. At Wesleyan, we know how to work hard, but we also know how to enjoy the work we choose to do. That’s been magically appealing to me for more than 40 years. I’ll bet the magic will appeal to many of those who are still in the process of getting to know our extraordinary university.

We Miss the Campus Amplification of Liberal Learning

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I recently published this piece in the Hechinger Report.

“Nothing ever changes in academia,” the refrain goes. “Universities still teach the same way they did in the Middle Ages!” Usually I hear this tune from folks in the business world.

Trustees at Wesleyan University, where I am president, have for years been singing the siren’s song to professors about the benefits of online teaching, and usually the answer they get is: “It just doesn’t work.” Well, things in academia are changing now! The coronavirus has upended our plans and our prejudices. Students have left their campuses, and entire curricula have shifted into distance-learning mode.

“Things will never be the same in higher education!” is the refrain of the moment, and not just in the business world. Those who expected radical disruption in the wake of the Great Recession now seem to believe that it’s the coronavirus that will lead to a massive migration of students away from in-person learning and toward the promised land of tech-infused distance education.

Of course, millions of students had already moved to online courses over the last several years, in programs that were either aimed at specific skill-building or in programs that offered greater flexibility (and affordability) than can typically be found in on-campus settings. But despite growth in the numbers and sophistication of online options, high school seniors continue to apply for the opportunity to learn with one another on a college campus. Will the 2020 coronavirus pandemic change that?

I myself was teaching a class on campus, “The Modern and the Postmodern,” that I am now teaching remotely. I’d already adapted this class in 2013 as one of Coursera’s free online humanities offerings. In our current stay-at-home period, more than a thousand people have joined the pre-recorded version of this class each week. For me, it was pretty easy to imagine how I’d supplement the online pre-recorded lectures from my MOOC with discussions with Wesleyan students on the Zoom platform. Although we record these discussions, almost all of my 50+ undergraduates attend class together. We’ve been talking about Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf and Michel Foucault in our first weeks online, and the students have been as insightful as ever in connecting these texts to their own situations.

My colleagues report similarly positive experiences. Even those who used to chide me about leaving intimate education behind in offering MOOCs seem to be finding real value in teaching remotely on a platform that allows for discussion as well as lectures. Professors all over the country have been sharing tips on making their online educational environments as interactive and potent as possible.

I’ve been particularly impressed by suggestions that lead to more active learning (or project-based learning) among students who are scattered across great distances. I never found the right way to do that in my MOOCs because there were so many students enrolled and they were not moving through the material together. But I see now there are many more ways to do this than I’d imagined — from collaborations on science problems to coordinating music ensembles. I recently “attended” a fabulous pipe organ class recital, now displaced onto the various kinds of instruments student have at home. The problem wasn’t just the platform, it was my own limitations as a creative teacher.

At this point, undergraduates seem able to get hold of the material and address the tasks assigned on the syllabus. Seminar discussions on Zoom, Teams or Google Hangouts can be lively, lectures can be understood, and breakout sessions and team projects can be completed. Still, many students want nothing more than to be back on campus.

A cynic might say that the entitled young people miss their climbing walls and their beer pong, their lazy rivers and their bar-hopping, and surely some do miss the social bonds that form in the recreational dimensions of the college experience. But students are finding they miss a lot more than that. They miss the opportunities that campuses provide to amplify the straightforward instruction from classes via serendipitous encounters, informal discussion and collaborative discovery.

Sure, classes convey information about molecular biology or World War II, macroeconomics or social psychology, but the lessons are amplified and become resonant as students talk about them in the cafeteria, before sports events, in the library or in the dormitory lounge. Campuses provide homes for students, to be sure, but they also are environments in which the specifics that one learns are integrated into who one is as a person and into what one comes to think and believe as a member of a community.

On a campus, students encounter other people learning, and even when the subject of discussion isn’t a class, the lessons of a liberal education resonate into multiple dimensions of their lives. For faculty, too, the opportunity to talk with colleagues and with students outside of class amplifies the continuous learning that is their calling.

We are unlikely to see a massive migration away from campuses as a result of more students and teachers having “discovered” distance learning. But professors are likely to use a wider array of digital tools so as to make their in-person teaching on campus as compelling as possible. Tools in liberal education may be changing, but its essential mission — its core task of empowering the whole person — is not.

We Americans can sometimes gravitate toward efficient transactions, but education is impoverished — not made frictionless — when it is reduced to isolated exchanges among people in predetermined boxes (even when those boxes are on a computer screen).

Our goal as teachers should be to facilitate the amplification of what we teach so that what students learn resonates more fully in their lives. In this way, the skills that students build will strengthen them not just in building successful careers but also in searching for meaning and connection in their years beyond the university.

Teaching and Religion

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This essay on teaching intellectual history courses that take religion seriously builds on some pages in Safe Enough Spaces. It recently appeared in The Atlantic

 

I had hardly finished my lecture when the student came bounding down the auditorium’s stairs.

“You’re just like all the others,” he said, fuming. “You don’t really take religion seriously.”

This happened a few years ago, when I was teaching a college course on virtue and vice. I had just finished talking about the Catholic thinker Thomas Aquinas. My sin? According to my student, I had “intellectualized” Saint Thomas. I had described his philosophical sources and his historical context, but had said little about the philosopher’s fundamental project—one that had everything to do with the salvation of our souls.

My student’s name, fittingly, was Tom. He was a believer at a secular liberal-arts school, and he was sick of being condescended to either by a campus lousy with self-congratulatory progressives or by teachers (like me, he assumed) who treated religious faith as an inert museum piece. “Wait,” I told him. “Today we talked historical context, and next time we’ll illuminate religious practice.”Tom was a rare exception. As a teacher, I find remarkable resistance to bringing religious ideas and experiences into class discussions. When I ask what a philosopher had in mind in writing about salvation, or the immortality of the soul, my normally talkative undergraduates suddenly stare down at their notes. If I ask them a factual theological question about the Protestant Reformation, they are ready with answers: predestination; “faith, not works”; and so on. But if I go on to ask students how one knows in one’s heart that one is saved, they turn back to their laptops. They look anywhere but at me—for fear that I might ask them about feeling the love of God or about having a heart filled with faith. In my cultural-history classes, we talk about sexuality and identity, violence and revolution, art and obscenity, and the students are generally eager to weigh in. But when I bring up the topic of religious feeling or practice, an awkward silence always ensues.

How to Choose (Our) University

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Throughout the month, high school seniors with the acceptance letters in hand, will be visiting campuses as they try to decide where to attend college. They are trying to envision the school at which they will be most likely to thrive. Where will I learn the most, be happiest, and form friendships that will last a lifetime? How to choose? As I do each spring, I thought it might be useful to re-post my thoughts on choosing a college, with a few revisions.

Of course, for many the decision will be made on an economic basis. Which school has given the most generous financial aid package? Wesleyan is one of a small number of schools that meets the full financial need of all admitted students according to a formula developed over several years. Wesleyan has made a commitment to keep loan levels low and to maintain only moderate (very close to inflation) tuition increases. We also offer a three-year program that allows families to save about 20% of their total expenses, while still earning the same number of credits.

After answering the question of which schools one can afford, how else does one decide where best to spend one’s college years? Of course, size matters.  Some students are looking for a large university in an urban setting where the city itself plays an important role in one’s education. New York and Boston, for example, have become increasingly popular college destinations, but not, I suspect, for the classroom experience. But if one seeks small classes and strong, personal relationships with faculty, then liberal arts schools, which pride themselves on providing rich cultural and social experiences on a residential campus, are especially compelling. You can be on a campus with a human scale and still have plenty of things to do. Wesleyan is somewhat larger than most liberal arts colleges but much smaller than the urban or land grant universities. We feel that this gives our students the opportunity to choose a broad curriculum and a variety of cultural activities on campus, while still being small enough to encourage regular, sustained relationships among faculty and students.

All the selective small liberal arts schools boast of having a faculty of scholar-teachers, of a commitment to research and interdisciplinarity, and of encouraging community and service. So what sets us apart from one another after taking into account size, location, and financial aid packages? What are students trying to see when they visit Amherst and Wesleyan, or Tufts and Pomona?

Students who are visiting campuses this month are trying to discern the personalities of each school. They are trying to imagine themselves on the campus, to get a feel for the chemistry of the place — to gauge whether they will be happy there. That’s why hundreds of visitors come to Wesleyan each week. They go to classes and athletic contests, musical performances and parties. And they ask themselves: Would I be happy at Wesleyan?

I hope our visitors feel the brave exuberance and ambition of our students, the intelligence and care of our faculty, the playful yet demanding qualities of our community. I hope our visitors can sense our commitment to creating a diversity in which difference is embraced and not just tolerated, and to public service that is part of one’s education and approach to life. Our students have the courage to find new combinations of subjects to study, of people to meet, of challenges to face.

Whatever college or university students choose, I hope they get three things out of their education: discovering what they love to do; getting better at it; learning to share it with others. I explain a little bit more about that in this talk to admitted students a few years ago:

We all know that Wesleyan is hard to get into, especially this year (once again) with a record number of applications. But even in the group of highly selective schools, Wes is not for everybody. We aspire to be a community committed to boldness as well as to rigor, to idealism as well as to effectiveness. Whether in the sciences, arts, humanities or social sciences, our faculty and students are dedicated to explorations that invite originality as well as collaboration. The scholar-teacher model is at the heart of our curriculum. Our faculty are committed to teaching and to shaping their disciplines. At Wesleyan, we know how to work hard, but we also know how to enjoy the work we choose to do. That’s been magically appealing to me for more than 30 years. I bet the magic will enchant many of our visitors, too.