Author: Michael S. Roth '78

Each year, incoming students are asked to read a common text as an intellectual introduction to Wesleyan. This year’s selection, a documentary entitled "This Changes Everything," offers an unflinching look at the impact …

At a faculty meeting in early March, the coronavirus was third on my list of agenda items to talk about, after facilities improvements and fundraising progress. When I mentioned a colleague’s suggestion that Wesleyan can…

When I arrived as a student here in 1975, I had never ventured far from the United States. My mind-opening studies in European cultural history soon took me to France, where later I would live for some years. When I retu…

Whatever you study in college, you should be prepared to talk about what you’ve learned with people who haven’t studied your subject. In a world in which so many are locked into small silos of understanding, it’s a great…

Many liberal arts colleges have come under extraordinary duress in recent years, and many universities (when not just focused on specialized research) seem to have abandoned broad, contextual learning in favor of vocatio…

IDEAS is now a minor, and I suspect before too long it will take its place among the interdisciplinary majors offered at the university. I can hardly wait to see what faculty and students make of this addition to our edu…

“Reading the morning newspaper is the realist’s morning prayer,” wrote Georg Friedrich Hegel. “One orients one’s attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the l…

The question took me by surprise. I had just finished lecturing to about 75 undergraduates at Peking University on the virtues of American-style pragmatic liberal education. My book Beyond the University: Why Liberal Edu…

Across America, groups are enclosing themselves in bubbles that protect them from competing points of view, even from disturbing information. This has always happened to some extent; it’s easier to be with people who sha…