In Conversation: A Crucial Moment for Higher Ed
As the curtain opens onto a new, unpredictable era in American politics, there’s no shortage of urgent questions the Wesleyan community needs to confront. How do we ensure democracy can still flourish in the face of antidemocratic forces? How can we continue to cultivate civic engagement, on campus and off, even as civic institutions themselves face so much distrust? What are the perils and possibilities in the months and years ahead? Put simply: Where do we go from here?
To search for answers, President Michael S. Roth ’78 joined Wesleyan’s Executive Director of the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life and host of NPR’s Disrupted Khalilah Brown-Dean, for a wide-ranging conversation on fostering hope in the face of cynicism, escaping our echo chambers, what DEI really means, and building fellowship by granting the permission to be wrong.
Read a transcript of the conversation:
Khalilah Brown-Dean:
Hi, I am Khalilah Brown-Dean. I’m the Rob Rosenthal Distinguished Professor of Civic Engagement and Executive Director of the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, here at Wesleyan University. Today, I’ll be having a conversation with President Michael Roth. And as many of you know, the last five years of higher education have been met with a lot of challenges. We’ll talk about what that means for Wesleyan, how we prepare our students for civic engagement, and how we chart a path forward together.
Khalilah Brown-Dean:
So happy new year, Michael.
Michael S. Roth:
Happy year to you.
Khalilah Brown-Dean:
It’s good to be here with you and in conversation with you.
Michael S. Roth:
Good to be with you too.
Khalilah Brown-Dean:
I’m curious, Michael, we both are working in higher education at a time when there’s a lot of uncertainty. There’s a lot of angst in some ways, but also possibility. And we’re also working in higher education on the cusp of a new presidential administration in the US, and that can hold a lot of implications for what we do and how we do it. I want us, in our convo, to take a step back and think about what’s been happening at Wesleyan over the last year to really build our students up in terms of civic engagement and to think about our future together. So how would you reflect on the year that has been?
Michael S. Roth:
Well, it’s been such a roller coaster. In recent years, we’ve tried to get many more people involved in the public sphere, and I think with some success. Sometimes they don’t need our encouragement. Wesleyan kids, they’re eager to participate, and sometimes with a little encouragement, it becomes part of their general education in a really deep way. And so we had this democracy event here in the spring, and we had other things throughout the fall; you’ve been involved with the Allbritton Center and working with lots of students who get involved in various levels. So I thought all of those things were great.
And I was surprised by the results of the election, and the fact that so many fewer people voted than in the previous presidential election I take as a sign that many people in this country just don’t have faith in the basic institutions that we use to govern ourselves—and I would include that they don’t have faith in the institutions like colleges and universities. They don’t have faith in higher education. And of course, I knew that. I’ve seen the polls that there’s been a decline of trust. But in the wake of the election, I really feel that people in working in higher ed have an obligation to think through what it would mean for us to restore some trust in higher education. Not that everybody will like everything we do—it’s impossible—but that many more people would see what we are attempting to do as a valuable contribution to the public good. That’s where I’m focused now, Khalilah: a deeper form of civic engagement that would help us understand the decline in trust, and help us rebuild some trust.
Khalilah Brown-Dean:
I think back to when I started at Wesleyan in May.
Michael S. Roth:
Yes.
Khalilah Brown-Dean:
And what was clear in that very first interaction was that our students weren’t so much concerned about Democrats and Republicans, would it be Biden or Trump: They were concerned about issues. They were concerned about policy. They were concerned that many of the people who said they cared about them or would represent them weren’t speaking with them and weren’t listening to them. And so those ways that trust has been eroded, not just in institutions but in the people who lead those institutions, and of younger people saying, at the end of the day, what will that mean for my life, for my future, and the people that I care about? That is the piece that I think is so unique for Wesleyan students, but is also the challenge. Because while we have seen a decline in the number of people who voted in 2024, I also don’t want us to lose sight of the changing laws that happened after that banner turnout in 2020, where you had over 30 states making it more difficult for people to register or to vote. And I think that our students, as representative of young people as a whole, are able to point out that hypocrisy: you tell us to go vote, you tell us that we should care, you tell us to be engaged, and then you make it more difficult for us to do that. How do we break through or address some of that cynicism? Because it’s real, it’s palpable.
Michael S. Roth:
The level of cynicism is both about institutions and about the future. I mean, I think that’s one of the worrisome things and at the same time, perfectly understandable, given our failure to address climate change in a systematic way. I don’t think you can have an educational institution without hope. Education should breed hope, because you’re learning, you’re getting more aware of the world, you yourself are changing. So there’s a kind of forward momentum in education. Even if what you’re learning is how bad the world is, you’re learning about something in order to react to it more thoughtfully, compassionately, perhaps intelligently. And so creating reasonable paths for hopefulness is part of what we should be doing as students and teachers. And beyond the university, I think showing our fellow citizens that one of the things we do in higher education is to help students who have built hope act on that hope with more capacity to do things well in the world.
Khalilah Brown-Dean:
What are the ways that we address that so that we are building on that hope, we are creating opportunities for Wesleyan students, alum, faculty, all of the pieces of our community to do that and put it into action, so it’s not just theorizing about what could be, but acting in a way that affirms hope to build what should be?
Michael S. Roth:
Well, I think the first thing is you build community where you are. You treat each other well. And there’ll always be tensions. There’ll be people who disagree about things that are pretty fundamental: That’s because it’s a real community. It’s always that way. And finding avenues for building solidarity within the campus community I think is really important—knowing that we won’t agree on everything, but that we could still come together on some things.
And then, specifically about politics, I think building a democracy incubator or a civics engagement lab—I’m not sure what we’ll wind up calling this yet—to cultivate democracy on campus in a way that’s relevant off campus, is one of our major jobs in the next four years. If there are anti-democratic forces ascendant in the country, and there are, I think it’s very important for us to think about how to build democratic culture here on campus and with other schools—creating a network of schools that are thinking through how to practically build democracy. And that means engaging citizens about the issues they most care about and disrupting the discourse of division that’s so dominant in this country right now. It’s so easy to get people to turn on each other. What we want do is get people to turn together about things that matter to them, whether it’s clean water, whether it’s housing, whether it’s safer streets.
One of the beauties of this can be that we will be in conversation with schools very different from Wesleyan. I’d like to see us partner with a faith-based institution where some of the notions of community are really rooted in religion in a way that’s different from a more secular school like Wesleyan—although for some of our members, as you know, it is rooted in religion.
Because I believe that you can cultivate democracy without cultivating partisanship. You have this terrible momentum of division in the country where people at a fancy school, a selective school like Wesleyan, are perceived by others—not wrongly in my view—as having learned to be condescending, having learned to be too proud of being let into the exclusive club. That breeds a kind of anti-intellectualism, even an anti-educational point of view, which can really just be exploited by rich people and powerful people, because education should be a form of empowerment and it should be spread more widely.
And so I think our community, despite the fact that we’re highly selective, I think there’s a very strong commitment to spreading the fruits of the education we have access to, spread those fruits more widely.
Khalilah Brown-Dean:
I think there are a number of schools who have focused on dialogue and dialogue across difference, and learning how to talk to one another. Again, especially we’re at the five-year mark of the start of the pandemic, and all the ways that the social isolation that was necessary to keep us healthy and safe also eroded some of those basic skills. And so being able to reclaim that while also saying, it’s important to apply that knowledge, to get into spaces where, yes, you may be uncomfortable or it may be unfamiliar to you, but there are opportunities for growth and impact.
And what I also think is so important for Wesleyan as we move forward is to not just think about the national and global level, but how do our students engage locally and regionally, where they can have that direct impact, they can learn from people—not just feel like their role is to go teach people, but to learn from them and see the ways that people are navigating in an everyday way what these policies mean, what the changing cultural shifts around trust, around engagement, what that means for them. And I think, Michael, that will serve our students in really our broader community in personal ways as well as professional ways of preparing them for the world as they go into it.
Michael S. Roth:
I agree. But how do you see us pushing against the tendency really orchestrated by social media and other factors to steer people into like-mindedness? That you will be given news that fits your profile, you’ll be given information that you will tend to like, or that will make you outraged in a way that’s satisfying?
Khalilah Brown-Dean:
I think we all have an inclination to curate the echo chambers that reinforce what we think. So when some people say to me, “Oh, I was so surprised by the outcome of the election,” my immediate response is why? What was it that made you think that the outcome of the election was not possible? And that, again, isn’t about a candidate or party, but it’s about why do people not feel comfortable expressing certain views, or what are the community standards that we hold to so that we are willing to engage while also having some baseline understanding about what that engagement looks like?
I also think we take for granted the everyday ways that people are struggling in their lives, to have a basic decent sense of living that isn’t just financial, but is also about that hope and the possibility—that if I’m a parent who’s working hard to provide a future for my family, that they can have that opportunity. That, I think, cuts across many of the barriers that separate us and also allow us to think beyond social media. We have to build community. That’s the only way we go forward.
Michael S. Roth:
I’ve been calling for more political diversity on campus and more intellectual diversity for years now because I think our differences, although they can be intense, are not broad enough. They’re not the differences you see across the country as a whole. And so I think that one of the hopes I have is that the student interest in more intellectual diversity and more political diversity will prompt more of that in our educational offerings. And that if we can network with schools that have a different mix of people in them than we do, that that also will help our students encounter other people with whom they’ll have lots in common, but they would not normally interact with because they disagree about whatever—about Israel, or they disagree about religion, or they disagree about censorship or free speech issues—and that they can actually disagree and still find ways to work together. That’s such an important discovery.
Khalilah Brown-Dean:
And I think it’s also important to realize the ways that even the phrase intellectual diversity has been so politicized in the US, and is, in many ways, been used to undermine efforts to actually promote equity, to actually promote a more inclusive vision of not just the space of higher education, but really the country as a whole. And I’m thinking about it for Wesleyan, for higher education in particular, because we’re hearing all of the claims of dismantling offices of equity and inclusion, corporations moving away from opportunities to do that, at the same time that the country demographically is becoming more diverse.
Michael S. Roth:
The rebranding of DEI into a toxic enterprise was enormously successful in the past couple of years. And if I have seven minutes to tell people what we do in our DEI office here at Wesleyan, everybody says, “Wow, it’s fantastic. But it must be not like anyone else.” I think, no, no. I think there are a lot of places like Wesleyan where we have kids in a intro chemistry class who have had intro chemistry already at Exeter or Choate or something like that, so it’s the second or third time. It’s not as hard as the person who comes from public high school in San Antonio and he’s never seen this stuff before. So our DEI people, they don’t dumb down the class. They just make it easier for people to be prepared to succeed. Everybody’s in favor of that. The professor, the other students, everybody does better. When we have a religious discrimination, or we have anti-Semitism, or Islamophobia on campus, it’s our DEI people who are front and center.
So I see this, going forward, as us explaining what we do to make it possible for everyone to succeed at Wesleyan. And we have to, of course, make sure that we don’t have racism on campus, that we don’t have anti-Semitism or Islamophobia on campus. We are in a country where these are forces at play, and it’ll happen on campus because we’re part of a broader society. But I think there’s plenty we can do to encourage a spirit of belonging without cultivating a sense of guilt or of an unproductive picture of a society that’s irredeemably evil. Empowering people to be successful, especially those people who don’t have all the advantages of others who come to a place like Wesleyan: that’s the task of belonging, of fairness, and of diversity broadly conceived—racial, ethnic diversity, economic diversity, ideological, and political diversity.
Khalilah Brown-Dean:
I’m thinking about 2025, five-year mark of all the uprisings that happened after the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, and how quickly many universities, corporations, people went to the virtue signaling of, “Let me tell you why I am not like this.” And for me, as a first-generation college graduate, woman of color, in a profession where we continue to be very underrepresented, my response is always, “Don’t tell me. Show me.”
And so I think what’s critical in this moment is for a university like Wesleyan that is uniquely positioned of being a private university—that doesn’t have to navigate some of the challenges that our colleagues at public universities in a Texas, a Florida, even Michigan and Ohio, have to navigate—how do we actually work on that to say, “This is a core value for Wesleyan, that we believe that people should have opportunities, they should be able to pursue that. And that while we recognize historically, there are these structural barriers and impediments in terms of who can afford to be here or their experience once they’re there, we are committed to creating spaces to work through that”?
Michael S. Roth:
Yeah. No, I think that’s so important. My own experience at Wesleyan, I have a group of vice presidents that I work with, is maybe among the most diverse cabinet group probably in the country. I can’t tell you how much that’s a pleasure and how much I learn from being in a room with people whose life experiences and educational pathways, and sometimes belief systems, are different from mine. To me, the benefit of that is so obvious on a week to week level. I’m glad, you remind me that the work of actually recruiting a diverse community of learning and of working is not nearly done. We may be done with the privileged circle or some form of training that didn’t work so well, but we have so far to go still in recruiting a more diverse faculty, a more diverse student body.
Khalilah Brown-Dean:
For me, leading Allbritton, that is priority for me, to curate those kinds of spaces. I think intellectual diversity will come, I think viewpoint diversity will come when we curate spaces where people across identities, experiences, worldviews, can be in a space together where they are working on something together. There’s a sense of ownership there. There’s an increased sense of belonging and connection that says, “You and I may have grown up in very different spaces, have very different paths to where we are today, but we have this common goal.”
And I also am keenly aware, you and I both engage in public scholarship. We both talk to people in very different spaces in different ways. I’m keenly aware that what we write about, the kind of work that we do in practice and the lived reality can be a challenge. How do we work through that together?
Michael S. Roth:
Giving students permission to be wrong. And what I mean by that, by the permission to be wrong, is that they can try on ideas that other people might find offensive, and that’s okay. Because if they trust each other enough, then they can try out an idea and they actually may think they believe it, they may not be sure about it, but when they hesitate to even express it because they’re afraid to be criticized by their fellow students or by their teacher, that’s a problem. And so I think creating spaces where people can actually disagree civilly, or at least in a friendly enough matter, one can have significant differences of opinion without falling into that slippery slope argument, “Well, if I let you say that, then we’re going to have to let you say something that’s fascist or Nazi,” or the phrase that people use it, “You’re denying my humanity.”
I think fear is our enemy here. Of course, you have to protect people from being intimidated in a way that’s counter-educational, and I don’t think there’s any formula for that, but I think you can create an environment where people don’t feel threatened, even if they feel offended. When you have a heated debate at Allbritton, how do you navigate these things?
Khalilah Brown-Dean:
Yeah, for me, I’m always—one, I love a good debate. I’m a political scientist by training. I love a good debate. I will debate ideals. I will debate ideas and policies. I don’t debate identity and worth. And so I think it is also about creating a set of community expectations, what does that mean, of saying, “Yes, we’re all here to learn. We’re all here to teach one another and learn from one another.”
But at the same time, I think that sometimes that debate and discussion can devolve into attack on person and personhood. That, I think, is a risk. I also think that is the power and the mandate of higher education in this moment. We don’t have all the answers. But we are curious enough, we’re committed enough to have the conversation, to think about the people with whom we want and need to build, and to realize, frankly, the college students that I teach today were not the same college students that I taught 20 years ago when I started. And all the ways that I learn from my students, to be challenged by them and to practice that humility enough to say, “The world they’re navigating is different.”
Michael S. Roth:
I think it’s going to be very important in the coming years to defend freedom of research and freedom of expression. And I think that academic freedom for students and faculty and staff to pursue research as they see fit, given their discipline and their expertise, or to mount a show or a dance performance or an art exhibit in ways that they see fit, despite how it might affect other people or offend some in the broader public—I’m sure there’ll be occasions to stand up for those things in the coming months and years. And universities have been spectacular places to incubate creativity when the broader culture is clamping down on things or becoming less hospitable to adventure, intellectual adventure or artistic adventure.
Khalilah Brown-Dean:
I think of the work of Anna Deavere Smith—the ability of art to communicate, to bring us together in powerful ways that can feel confrontational or less confrontational, but can create bridges that maybe we don’t see as apparent in our everyday lives. I think the role of art will be important to build those bridges and connections, but I also think redefining what we mean by academic freedom and how the ways that freedom of speech, freedom of expression, how it plays into the mechanisms that we have to do that. It’s one of the things that, with Allbritton and our Hugo Black Lecture this year, Emily Bazelon will speak about it, about do we need to think about freedom of speech differently when we see so much misinformation, disinformation, the intentional misleading of the public in order to have a desired outcome?
Michael S. Roth:
These are the kind of questions universities are well-placed to examine with courage and with honesty—as you said before, knowing we don’t have all the answers, but having the courage to ask the questions.
