M any college presidents and deans are issuing mealymouthed statements, ending long-standing programs, removing content from websites and otherwise cowering in the face of the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education. Then there’s Michael S. Roth.
The president of Connecticut’s Wesleyan University wrote a piece in Slate that described some of the Trump administration rhetoric as authoritarian. He consistently reposts articles criticizing Trump’s decisions. He speaks and blogs firmly in defense of diversity, equity and inclusion; transgender rights; and immigration.
Roth is demonstrating the kind of eloquence and resistance we desperately need from the leaders of not only colleges but also corporations, nonprofits and other organizations in the face of Trump’s onslaught against the rule of law, civil society and key American institutions.
“Leaders in higher educational institutions should stand up for their values. Not to pick a fight with Donald Trump or JD Vance,” Roth told me in an interview last week. “We should stand up for our values because we’ve said we believed in them for the last many decades now.”
In our conversation, Roth slammed prominent Republicans, specifically naming the president, vice president and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for using their Ivy League degrees to advance professionally but now portraying themselves as anti-elite populists.
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“The story of American higher education has been hijacked by people who’ve benefited from it. They’ve succeeded in life in part because of the education they’ve had. But they get out and then they kind of pull up the ladder,” said Roth, who has been president of Wesleyan since 2007.
But Roth also criticizes his counterparts who lead universities and other nonpartisan institutions. Trying to address criticisms that they are too left-leaning, many universities in recent years have embraced a policy of “institutional neutrality,” namely that the college president and the school itself won’t take stances on high-profile political issues.
Roth correctly argues that approach is wrongheaded. Universities must engage in politics, because, as Trump is showing now, their funding and very survival depends in part on decisions by government leaders.
“Leaders in civil society shouldn’t be ‘demure’ in the face of authoritarian attempts to align all power with a president’s agenda, civil society be damned,” Roth wrote earlier this month. “Business and civic officials, religious authorities and college presidents should weigh in when they see the missions of their institutions — not to speak of the health of their country — compromised.”
And on the flip side, American democracy needs universities for the countless benefits they provide.
“There’s so many ways in which American higher education has contributed to the culture of innovation and discovery in this country. And everyone around the world knows that. The Chinese are trying to do what we’ve done. They’re building university after university,” Roth told me.
Roth, of course, isn’t the only higher-education leader making this case. The American Council on Education, a lobbying group that represents many universities, has been sharply criticizing Trump. Some schools have joined lawsuits against Trump’s executive orders.
And Roth, 67, is in a safer position to criticize the administration than most college presidents. Wesleyan is small (approximately 3,000 students) and in a blue state. As a private school, it’s not as reliant on government funds as public universities. Wesleyan is the 14th-best liberal arts college in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report. But what happens on the university’s campus in Middletown doesn’t get the outsize attention of universities such as the one 26 miles south (Yale).
All that said, Roth is a surprising figure to be perhaps Trump’s strongest critic among college presidents. He isn’t particularly left-leaning or from an activist background. Roth is an intellectual historian who teaches classes where students read Aristotle and other long-dead white men — the kind of works many conservatives say don’t have a prominent enough role in modern curriculums.
Nor is Roth a reflexive defender of universities. He argues that elite colleges have too many kids from wealthy families. (Wesleyan offers plenty of financial aid, but its sticker price of about $70,000 is probably off-putting for middle- and working-class parents.) And the Wesleyan president has long conceded a key talking point of the right: Elite Northeastern colleges, including his own, don’t have enough conservative voices on campus and should increase those ranks.
Roth joked that students on campus view him as a conservative.
Roth instead described himself as ideologically and politically pragmatic. So though he is very critical of the Trump administration, he has emphasized that the university will follow federal law. Wesleyan is looking carefully at its policies on diversity and inclusion to prevent them from becoming a target for lawsuits from conservatives.
Roth, though, is making one decision that is perhaps not so pragmatic: sharply criticizing an authoritarian leader in a prominent news outlet (The Post) that the leader and his aides likely read. When I asked Roth if he was nervous about agreeing to my interview request, he laughed.
“I laugh because of course I’m nervous,” he said. “This is an administration that is prioritizing loyalty and attacking people who stand, not against them necessarily, but for their own ideals and missions. That is the authoritarian playbook. If I was hiding — Wesleyan is a small school — maybe they would never notice us.”
He added, “But that’s how tyranny gets instituted in a country. … I’m a professor, a teacher. I don’t look for trouble. But I would feel ashamed if I didn’t speak up for the values that have guided my institution and many others.”