Bring it on! More encampments, more divisiveness, more people rooting for terrorists and demanding divestment from the world’s only Jewish state! This, apparently, is what Michael Roth, the President of prestigious Wesleyan College, is calling for in his new NYT op-ed. Click below to read, or find the article archived here.
Now the title is a bit misleading. Although Roth wants a return to the days when the main mission of colleges was often said to be “producing good citizens” rather than “research. teaching and learning, especially learning how to think”, he’s really not saying much more beyond the latter mission, though he sounds radical at the start (emphasis below is mine):
Last year was a tough one on college campuses, so over the summer a lot of people asked me if I was hoping things would be less political this fall. Actually, I’m hoping they will be more political.
That’s not to say that I yearn for entrenched conflict or to once again hear chants telling me that I “can’t hide from genocide,” much less anything that might devolve into antisemitic or Islamophobic harassment or violence. But since at least the 1800s, colleges and universities in the United States have sought to help students develop character traits that would make them better citizens. That civic mission is only more relevant today. The last thing any university president should want is an apolitical campus.
College students have long played an important, even heroic role in American politics. Having defended the voting franchise during the civil rights movement and helped to end the Vietnam War, they have continued to work for change across a range of social issues. If you went to college in the past 50 years, there’s a good chance the mission statement of your school included language that emphasized the institution’s contribution to society. Like many others, my university’s founding documents speak of contributing to the good of the individual and the good of the world. Higher-education institutions have never been neutral.
Well, that’s not exactly true. First of all, where’s the evidence that college students have produced, on average, more social justice than people who didn’t go to college? (These days, in fact, it seems to be the opposite, as antiliberal wokeness is concentrated in influential colleges.) I’m betting, in fact, that the Civil Rights movement of the sixties was propelled not by traits developed by a college education (granted, Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King did go to college), but by simple awareness of a morality involving equal rights and opportunities. And those things you don’t learn in college.
Further, when Roth asserts that “higher-education institutions have never been [politically] neutral,” he’s just wrong. Contributing to the good of civilization is not a violation of political neutrality; divesting from Israel is. And plenty of colleges, most notably mine, refuse to take stands on political issues (viz., the Kalven Report).
But wait! There’s more:
The issue that matters most to many activists right now is the war in Gaza, and protesters will undoubtedly continue to make their voices heard. Last spring at Wesleyan, students built an encampment of up to about 100 tents to protest the war and to call for the university to divest from companies thought to be supporting it. Since the protest was nonviolent and the students in the encampment were careful not to disrupt normal university operations, we allowed it to continue because their right to nonviolent protest was more important than their modest violations of the rules.
I walked through the protest area daily, as did many faculty members, students and staff members. I also met with pro-Israel students, mostly Jewish, some of whom felt beleaguered by what their classmates were saying. I made clear that if any of them felt harassed, I would intervene. I also said that I could ensure their ability to pursue their education but that I could not protect them from being offended.
Good thing President Roth doesn’t lead Columbia (see latest report here) or Stanford, where recent reports show pervasive anti-Semitism as documented by student reports (granted, it’s based on students’ experiences, but that’s exactly what Roth wants to know about). Further, on many campuses the protests certainly did violate campus regulations, as well as the law. Roth seems to be unaware of that.
Roth also seems to think that the only alternative to the college mission of “developing good citizens” is “helping students get a job”. But of course learning itself, and learning how to think, do research, and analyze arguments, is a third alternative, and one that is a quality we want in our citizens but comes as a byproduct of the third mission:
These days many Americans seem to think that education should be focused entirely on work force development. They define the “good of the individual” as making a living, not working with others to figure out how to live a good life. It’s understandable. In these days of economic disparities, social polarization and hyperpartisanship, it is certainly challenging to talk with one’s neighbors about what we want from our lives in common. But that is the core of political discussion.
In the end, in fact, Roth shows that the qualities that make for effective learning just happen to be the qualities he thinks produce “good citizens”: freedom of thought and speech, and the ability to discuss things rationally and civilly, and, especially, to pay attention to those with opposing views. Who would have thought that?:
Professors aren’t in classrooms to entice students to share their ideology; they are there to challenge students to grapple with how much more there is to learn about any issue that really matters.
These discussions, like all authentic learning, depend on freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression. They also involve deep listening — thinking for ourselves in the company of others. The classical liberal approach to freedom of expression underscores that discussions are valuable only when people are able to disagree, listen to opposing views, change their minds.
To strengthen our democracy and the educational institutions that depend on it, we must learn to practice freedom better. This fall we can all learn to be better students and better citizens by collaborating with others, being open to experimentation and calling for inclusion rather than segregation — and participating in the electoral process. As for those loud voices in the political sphere who are afraid of these experiments, who want to retreat to silos of like-mindedness, we can set an example of how to learn from people whose views are unlike our own.
Forget about the DEI-ish “inclusion” part, and it’s beyond me why college should teach students how to “participate in the electoral process” when anybody with neurons already knows how to vote. What Roth has produced, under a novel and provocative title, is just the same old (and, yes, salubrious) call for truly free speech and a college ethos of imparting and creating knowledge. My reaction is “meh.”
I asked Greg Mayer what he thought of the piece, and his first response was this (quoted with permission):
It’s pretty awful, both in overview and detail. God help Wesleyan with people like him in charge.
Followed by this in a second response:
To elaborate a bit, Roth seems nostalgic for the 60s, and wants to regenerate that atmosphere. To do so, he is willing to bend the rules and negotiate under conditions approaching blackmail. He adopts the anti-woke stance of “you have to handle being offended”, but he doesn’t want to offend pro-Hamas protesters. Roth doesn’t seem to know what institutional neutrality is, and he doesn’t know what universities are for.
And a second addendum:
Also, Roth’s attempt to invoke alternatives to the neoliberal consensus is risible. Higher ed is so deep into neoliberalism they don’t even know what it is anymore, him included. (Search “neoliberal consensus” on WEIT for discussion.) His apparent alignment with “progressives” reveals his fondness for neoliberalism. As Adolph Reed wrote, antiracism is a neoliberal alternative to a left.
Greg’s reaction is stronger than my “meh,” he thinks that Roth is basically pushing nonsense. But both Greg and I agree that the article makes no new arguments, and also floats some bad ones.
This will probably get a day of air play and then disappear into the ether. Judging from the excerpts published here (I don’t have access to the full essay), the title is clickbait and the rest is pablum.
Yes, I put a link to the archived full essay. Whenever you see the words “archived here”, I’ve found the fulll article and put it in that link.
Duh. I missed the link even though it was right there in front of me.
As a Jewish mother of college age children and as a member of maca ( mother’s against college Antisemitism) he is about to loose his Jewish population , maybe that was his purpose. But we are not sending our children to schools likes his. We will send our children to schools where they are protected, appreciated and valued. As someone who is secular, Yeshiva university is starting to look very appealing.
Hopefully all alumni will end their funding towards his school. This is the result of DEI that has turned our campuses and youth into rot. Values, honor and merit and good education are a thing of the past.
+1
The President should organize daily debates between one or two pro-Palestinian supporters, and one or two pro-Israel supporters. And try to invite big names like Shadi Hamid and Douglas Murray. That would be beneficial to all.
http://www.npr.org/2024/09/05/nx-s1-5099101/college-presidents-consider-how-to-respond-to-a-new-school-year-of-campus-protests\
If I correctly understand Roth in the last minute or so of the recording, he is against institutional neutrality.
Judging by the quoted sections, this sounds like the president of Wesleyan ordered a flunky in the school’s public relations cave to get him pronto a puff piece sufficiently empty for the New York Times.