Can college survive Trump?

This is an episode we think you’d enjoy of The Gray Area with Sean Illing. American higher education is under attack. Project 2025 laid out the battle plan pretty clearly: Get rid of the Department of Education, shut off federal funding, take control of the accreditation system, and take down diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. And in the end, change what students are encouraged to study and what professors are allowed to teach. The questions we’re left with is why? And is it working? Today’s guest is Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University. He’s a vocal defender of higher education. But he’s also honest about where things have gone wrong and what needs to change. Michael and Sean discuss the Trump administration’s efforts to change universities and colleges, the potential societal effects of that effort, political biases on campus, the dangers of ideological conformity, and the value of a college education (what is even the point of going to college any more?). You can listen to more of this podcast by searching for The Gray Area with Sean Illing in your podcast app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 0:48Speaker 01

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• 1:19Speaker 02

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• 1:49Speaker 03

  Hey, everyone. Scott here. I'm just getting back from vacation. And while our team ramps production back up, we're bringing you an episode from the gray area. This one's about growing attacks on higher education. Project 2025 laid out a plan to shut down the Department of Education and cut off federal funding, basically to reshape what college looks like in America. Host Sean Iling talks with Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, about what's behind all this, what's happening, and whether college is still worth it. Hope you enjoy. We'll be back with our usual programming next week.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  American higher education is under attack. Project 2025 laid out the battle plan pretty clearly. Get rid of the Department of Education, shut off federal funding, take control of the accreditation system, and take down diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. And in the end, change what students are encouraged to study and what professors are allowed to teach. The question we're left with is why? And is it working?

• 2:58Speaker 04

  I'm Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.

• 3:06Speaker 04

  Today's guest is Michael Roth. He's the president of Wesleyan University and also a historian, a professor, and the author of several books about college, like Beyond the University and The Student: A Short History. Roth is one of higher ed's most vocal defenders. But he's also honest about where things have gone wrong and what needs to change. And he's willing to take a moral and political stand against authoritarian overreach from the government, which he sees as an attack not just on colleges and universities, but on civil society itself. It's a pressing, urgent topic, one that I happen to care a lot about.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  So I invited him on the show to talk about everything that's happening right now and why it matters, but also to zoom out, to use this critical moment to ask, what is college actually for?

• 4:10Speaker 04

  Michael Roth, welcome to the show. Glad to be here.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  I have heard you say that being a university president is the best job in the world. I gotta say, man, um, from where I sit, it sure doesn't look like the best job in the world right now. Is this still your official position?

• 4:29Speaker 05

  It is my position, uh, both officially and unofficially. Presidents do a lot of whining about how hard it is. Uh, but we're very well paid, as most people know, because it's public. And I get to be around lots of interesting young people, scholars, researchers, teachers. So of course there are challenges, especially now, the federal government has stepped into the breach to provide extraordinary challenges. But despite all the protests of how hard it is, a woe is me that you hear from, from presidents. I think it's, it's a very cool job. I, I mean, I'm working now, talking to you as part of my job. You know, I go to a football game, I'm working.

• 5:13Speaker 04

  Like you, you get to talk to me.

• 5:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:15Speaker 04

  Higher ed, as you know, is in a pretty tough place at the moment for a variety of reasons that we will get into. You have been out there as much as any university president, maybe more than any other, defending universities. You were just at a conference, in fact, and you said very bluntly that the federal government, and now I'm quoting, "The federal government is trying to destroy civil society by undermining the legitimacy of colleges and universities." I want to just start there. That's a pretty dramatic statement. What do you mean? Help people understand what's actually happening right now?

• 5:58Speaker 05

  Well, I guess I should start with what, what did I mean by civil society? Uh, I see, and I'm not alone in this, the march of authoritarianism, uh, often characterized by the effort to erase what philosophers or political theorists have called intermediary institutions, be they churches or corporations, uh, schools, universities, entertainment, we would say these days, parts of the society that have legitimacy independent of the government's ideology or power.

• 6:34Speaker 05

  And when you have an authoritarian or would be authoritarian, one of the things they often do, maybe always do, is try to either erase those independent sources of legitimacy, or as the Nazis say, coordinate them, you know, glasgow, to somehow coordinate all of them in the direction that the leader wants to go in. And so I think it's extraordinarily clear that the Trump administration is hell-bent on destroying civil society, understood as that arena of our culture and our polity

• 7:14Speaker 05

  that has sources of legitimacy independent of the ideology of the person in the White House. And you see that in the attack on law firms. You see it in the attack on the press. I mean, it's an enormous success of this has been that we got used to that kind of stuff. And the war on universities is similar to that. You know, they're not really going after universities that have egregious issues of civil rights violations. They're going after the high-profile, high-legitimacy institutions like Harvard, like UVA, like the other Ivy League schools with the exception of Dartmouth. And they're doing that because these schools have a claim on our allegiance

• 7:58Speaker 05

  or our respect that is not founded in the ideology of those currently in the White House.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  Well, when you say destroying, what do you actually mean? What is the administration actually doing to stifle or censor or otherwise disrupt the mission and the independence of universities across the country?

• 8:21Speaker 05

  Well, they start with the easy thing, right? Like, trans women athletes. I think there are 12 in the country in NCAA varsity sports. And that's a winning issue for a variety of reasons. And so the White House is going to determine who plays volleyball. Okay. And then they're going to determine how to teach Mideast or Near Eastern studies.

• 8:55Speaker 05

  Okay, they're going to say, "If you don't teach Near Eastern Studies the way we want you to, with appropriate respect for Israel, let's say, then you're not going to get money for Alzheimer's research." Now, again, okay, it's not Harvard, but what happens is that everybody in higher education starts hedging their bets, that is, they start moving away from anything that might offend those in the White House, and those beholden to people in the White House. And so you have this slide from the university as fostering an oppositional culture, which it has in the United States for a long time, at least since the Second World War, towards

• 9:39Speaker 05

  the universities as institutions in which people with money, power, diplomas, legitimacy, that they start trying to anticipate what they should say to not annoy, or even to please, the President and his friends. And that, to me, is destroying higher education, just like it would be destroying journalism if the administration was able to punish broadcast journalists for editing interviews. Make it just impossible to edit an interview without pissing off the President, then you're

• 10:23Speaker 05

  going to destroy journalism. Not in one fell swoop, but the news this morning at Paramount has decided to, what, send $16 million to settle what everyone knows is a bogus, everyone knows is a bogus case. It'll mean that journalists just move closer to those in power. And that, to me, will destroy the independence of this sector.

• 10:49Speaker 05

  And I think that's the point. I don't think President Trump really cares what kind of Alzheimer's research is being done at Harvard. No. But he wants to make sure that people at Harvard and then everyone who doesn't have the resources that Harvard has to fight, everyone else lines up. And I think that's why you don't see a lot of opposition from colleges and universities right now, because everyone has already started lining up.

• 11:10Speaker 04

  Well, you mentioned UVA, and I wanted to ask about that because it's in the news. And for people who don't know, the president of UVA recently resigned, or I shouldn't say resigned, he was forced out by the Justice Department as a condition to, I guess, settle the civil rights investigation into the school's diversity or DEI program, however you want to put it. I assume you are in a, you're the leader of a university president signal group chat. What are your colleagues saying about this? How would you characterize what went down there? And do you see it as pretending what might be coming elsewhere?

• 11:53Speaker 05

  I do. I mean, and I think that's the point. I mean, it wasn't it Kristi Noem who said something like, colleges should beware, pay attention. You know, we can do this to you too. And so what happened at UVA, what I know is only what's in the press. I actually, I know Jim Ryan a little bit. You know, he was dedicated to diversity, equity, inclusion. By the way, the mission statement of the University of Virginia calls, says that the university is defined by a diverse community. It's actually in their own mission statement. And President Ryan had gotten the governing board to approve significant

• 12:38Speaker 05

  expenditures to try to create a more diverse community at UVA. And that, of course, is currently running, would run afoul of the president's interpretation of civil rights statutes.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Key word there is interpretation.

• 12:58Speaker 05

  Yeah. My view is that actually, the guys who win the election have the right to do that. You know, when Obama, Biden were in power, they interpreted the civil rights statutes to say that if you're accused of sexual assault, you don't get to cross-examine the person accusing you.

• 13:16Speaker 05

  And that was an extraordinary step. And they threatened schools with severe punishments if they didn't implement those policies in that time. But they actually never punished any schools, as far as I know. I mean, they negotiated with them to change the way they handle sexual assault on campuses. But I do think that Trump administration has the right to say that anything that smacks of reverse discrimination is a violation of the civil rights statutes. And I don't think this is a wise policy myself, but they won the election.

• 13:59Speaker 05

  And we have at Wesleyan changed the way we approach this. We had a policy where we said we had target of opportunity hires. You had an all white department and you knew of a really great scholar who was going to add racial or ethnic diversity to your department. Or a military veteran who was going to join the physics department and you didn't have many veterans, let's say, in that section of the sciences. Or any veterans, then we would say, let's try to hire that person, even if it wasn't their turn, so to speak. We can't do that anymore. And I accept that. I mean, again, I don't like it, but you don't always get what you want in democracy. So that seems to me fine.

• 14:43Speaker 05

  But what they did at UVA is to say that the university wasn't moving quickly enough to change its policies to be in accord with this new interpretation of civil rights statutes. And they had done many changes, as far as I could tell. But it seemed to me, and this is my interpretation. I have no inside knowledge of this, that they wanted a trophy. They wanted Jim Ryan's resignation as a trophy because that's a warning to other people. You put Ryan's head on a stick and you put it out there. And then other presidents say. I don't want to run afoul of this administration.

• 15:26Speaker 04

  And when you say the government has a, you think the government has a right to encroach in this way? What do you mean by that?

• 15:32Speaker 05

  Well, I think that their understanding of it is an interpretation that I find mistaken. But it's not incoherent. In other words, I think the decision about affirmative action admissions was wrong. I don't like it. But it's, it's, there's an argument for it that states very clearly that discrimination in the current environment

• 15:59Speaker 05

  is wrong, even if it is meant to correct historic or historic discrimination or patterns of sociological discrimination, systemic, we like to say, discrimination. They say, no, what matters is individual fairness. I think that's wrong, but I think that's coherent position, that individual fairness trumps everything. And that you can't substitute history and sociology for individual judgment. Again, I, we can have an argument about why that's wrong, in my view, and they would say why it's right in their view. My view is that they, they won the election, they get to enforce the rules in a coherent way and stay within the law.

• 16:45Speaker 05

  What we're seeing instead is the use of civil rights legislation to ensure the obedience of institutions. Here, because the, the UVA was about DEI at Harvard, now it's about protecting Jews.

• 17:04Speaker 05

  Which is, is, I think, just a sham, a lie.

• 17:11Speaker 05

  But they're using that as a cover to ensure that the institutions conform to the wishes of those in power. And that is different.

• 17:22Speaker 04

  Can I ask, Mike, are you feeling any of this at Wesleyan right now? What are you dealing with there on the ground? What are you hearing from students, parents, professors? Has this touched your university?

• 17:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, it has in small ways. I think if you have a hospital or massive PhD programs in the sciences, it hits you very differently than, let's say, a liberal arts university like ours, where we do have PhD programs in the sciences and we do have federal funding. But it's a smaller scale. And so we're not immune to these threats, but they're not existential either. So we feel it to some extent, for sure. I mean, we have Pell Grant students and we have grants from the national endowments and from the NIH. And we've had some grants canceled.

• 18:17Speaker 05

  But we haven't felt it the same way as some of the schools one reads about in the newspaper.

• 18:26Speaker 04

  As you know, a lot of people shrug their shoulders at all of this. They think, what's the big deal? These campuses are full of privileged people with predictably extreme views, views that aren't representative of most of the country. So who cares? To that sort of reaction, and it is a common reaction. What do you say?

• 18:48Speaker 05

  Well, it's been an orchestrated reaction. I think that, you know, at UVA, the fastest growing majors, I think, are computer science and the fastest growing minor is data science. Hardly the stuff of woke lunatics. And at Harvard, you know, the most popular majors are the ones that lead to Wall Street. Again, this notion that Harvard or UVA is filled with people with extreme views who are unrepresentative of America, they're unrepresentative of America because they're really smart. They're smarter than I am.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  Oh, hot take.

• 19:31Speaker 05

  No, I mean, you know, I couldn't get in there. I couldn't have gotten in when I was a young person. I certainly couldn't get in today. I mean, they're just really smart, gifted people. And so, of course, there's a lot of resentment to them, which is a reaction that is cultivated by the right these days.

• 19:52Speaker 05

  And it's unfortunate because in a democracy, you can also be really proud of people who excel. And we are, right? We are proud of people who excel, even though they do things we can't do. Like when I watch, I don't know, Patrick Mahomes play quarterback and escape a crazy rush.

• 20:12Speaker 05

  You know, I'm filled with admiration. I don't feel like, oh, he should, he should, I don't know, we should shoot him in the leg or something because he's so good. Or, you know, the elite fighters in the Navy SEALs, let's say, or the Army Rangers, we don't look, we don't think of them as elitist. We just think of them as exceptional. But at some of these schools, we resent them for having created an environment where people like those guys can thrive and the rest of us don't have access to it. So I think that the, that in a healthy democracy, you allow people to experiment with ideas,

• 20:56Speaker 05

  with art, with science, with politics. There's, it's never totally open-ended. Of course, there are always some guardrails on these things. And what we're seeing now is a concerted effort to bring those guardrails in so that people have to resemble those in power right now. And that is unusual in history of the United States. It has happened in other countries. But that reduction of a space of experimentation is not just about Harvard or University of Michigan or your local community college. It'll also be about the newspapers you read.

• 21:41Speaker 05

  It'll be about broadcast television. It'll be about Hollywood. It's already about law firms, right? Which ones get to have access to federal buildings? I mean, that notion, those executive orders that said, if you have defended certain people that the president doesn't like, your company will no longer have access to federal buildings. I mean, it's wildly ambitious in its authoritarianism. If they get to push around Harvard, they certainly will push around Wesleyan and Middlesex Community College and Rutgers and, you know, et cetera.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  You use the word orchestrated. Do you think this is completely manufactured? Do you think this is just partisan opportunism? Or is there something deeper going on here? I mean, even if some of this backlash, some of this resentment is cynical and engineered, and no doubt, a lot of it is. How much have universities contributed to it through leadership failures or bad policies?

• 22:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a fair question. I don't like it, as you can imagine, because when people ask me this question, I say, it would be like saying to the Ukrainians, hey, come on. Hunter Biden, corruption. You have problems in the mining industry, all of which, I mean, there's some stuff there. It's not great. But when the Russians are attacking, I mean, that's not why they're attacking. The Russians are attacking Ukraine because they want to take it over. The Trump administration is attacking colleges, universities, because they want to take them

• 23:22Speaker 05

  over, not because they, I don't know, they shouldn't have had encampments, or because not enough conservatives are going into physics. So, yes, universities have real problems, but I don't think that those problems are what has led to the assault on free speech, on freedom of association, and on the ability of schools to educate students the way they see fit. The problems of universities are political problems, and we haven't done a good job in solving them. Let me just mention two quick things. I'm sorry to go on so long on an answer to your brief question, but let me just mention

• 24:07Speaker 05

  two things. One is the ideological conformity, or the ideological narrowness of faculty in most colleges and universities, especially at those like mine and the highly selective schools in the Northeast. But all over the country, university faculty, faculties are mostly people left of center. And that has gotten much worse over time. And I think it's about prejudice on the part of the faculty, not only prejudice, but that faculty members hire folks who with whom they're comfortable. And so they hire people whose political views they're more comfortable with.

• 24:51Speaker 05

  And I think that's a problem. I think it should be fixed. I think that it could, and I think it should be fixed by the faculty itself. That is, they should be being aware of their prejudices. They should counteract them as best they can. So I think that's a significant problem. And then there's the broader cultural problem is that American higher education has for a good chunk of time now defined its quality on the basis of the number of people that are excluded from it. So we prize being highly selective. I use that phrase myself a few moments ago. We're a highly selective university. What does that mean? We don't, we reject most people who want to go there.

• 25:35Speaker 05

  And that has, that's a very American thing. It's not only American, but it's, it's, you know, that you want the thing you can't get access to. That's a traditional capitalist bourgeois effect that lots of people want the thing that they have trouble getting access to. And colleges, universities, I have said over time, have cultivated condescension rather than democratic practices. So in a culture that of grievance and resentment, which is ours in the last at least decade to 15 years, colleges and universities are especially vulnerable because we have prided

• 26:19Speaker 05

  ourselves on how hard it is to get into our schools rather than these schools that are so extraordinarily wealthy, deciding to educate not another 100 or 200 people, but to educate five times as many students because they can afford to do so. But they don't take that step. And then the last thing I'll mention quickly, which is such an obvious thing that colleges and universities do that's dramatically unfair, is that they give preferences to their own. Legacy preferences, which the Trump administration has not targeted. They probably could do it without political cost, but legacy preferences, you know, you take somebody because their parents went to your school. I mean, it's so obviously unfair at a highly selective school

• 27:04Speaker 05

  that it's California is trying to do a way where that, but in the Northeast, it's very much entrenched. And it's a great symbol for people of how the system is rigged against newcomers.

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• 31:18Speaker 04

  I think the basic problem that elite colleges in particular have right now, it's not just the sort of prejudice you're talking about in terms of hiring. It's about the content, it's about the teaching, the material itself. I think people outside of these institutions increasingly think they are places where ideology has been confused with inquiry, where education has been confused with activism. Columbia, for instance, has embraced its identity as a protest campus. Is this a problem for you? Or is this just what free speech is and what it ought to look like?

• 31:55Speaker 05

  Well, I think it is both of those things. I think it is a problem when schools define, let's say, activism or civic engagement in a very ideologically restricted way. I think it's an intellectual problem. I think it's a moral problem for schools. I'll give you an example. I'm giving a talk at some conference and a guidance counselor from a high school says, "I'll just tell you, if one of my students was applying to Wesleyan and she said her civic engagement was to protecting the rights of the unborn, it would be professional malpractice for me to allow her to put that in the application." Now, I guess I was naive.

• 32:39Speaker 05

  I was shocked by that. You know, I've been a president for a long time, I've been a faculty member. And I said, "Come on! Everybody knows that is civic engagement." And he said, "And everybody in my world," he said, "and guidance counselors know that your admissions people won't like it." That was, to me, a slap in the head. That I needed because I have no reason to doubt he was right because all these guidance counselors are like shaking their heads. And I think that's the way in which the soft despotism of prejudice in the college or university constricts this free speech, the realm of contestation.

• 33:22Speaker 05

  And I've been fighting against it now for the last decade or so, both as a person who has access to the media and writes articles about such things, give speeches about such things, but also as a teacher, adding more conservative voices into my own classes. I teach courses in the history of moral philosophy or a course on the modern and the postmodern. And so I've always privileged the kind of mavericks in philosophy or political theory. But now I'm also adding to my classes criticisms of those voices or those progressive thinkers. And sometimes the students are quite surprised by it.

• 34:06Speaker 05

  And they're totally capable of dealing with the issues. In other words, they may not on their own gravitate towards conservative critiques of progressivism, but once exposed to them, they're perfectly happy, willing, able to deal with a variety of perspectives. So all that is to say that a school can define a civic purpose, I think, that's not in tension with its educational purposes. And most schools in the United States, ever since the 1700s, have had a civic purpose as part of what they do. I think it's nonsense what some of the presidents these days are saying, oh, we're just for the pursuit of truth.

• 34:50Speaker 05

  Colleges in America have always been about character and about civics. And so we can embrace that, but we can't do it in a parochial way because if we do it in a parochial way, we're limiting the educational potential of our students to explore ideas that may not be currently fashionable in their generation or among the faculty. And I found at Wesleyan. Many faculty members who themselves might be leftists, you know, but are perfectly happy to teach a range of material, not satirically or critically, but actually because they know it's important,

• 35:33Speaker 05

  even if it's not where they've come down themselves. And if schools do that, I think they also make better citizens. That is, they make people who are more capable of dealing with disagreement and conflict in the public sphere.

• 35:52Speaker 04

  Do you see some cultural or institutional or moral harm in too much ideological conformity on campuses?

• 36:00Speaker 05

  I do, especially in humanities and interpretive social sciences. I think people don't ask certain questions that conservatives have long asked. They will neglect questions around, let's say, the family as an incubator of social practices. They won't ask questions around inequality that conservatives might ask, that progressives don't ask. So I think a lot of things just don't get asked because there's no one to ask those questions. Like, you know, when I was a graduate student, women were starting to go to graduate school and they were asking questions about women's history. And the men are like, women's history? It's just history, you know?

• 36:44Speaker 05

  And they said, no, well, actually, it's men's history. You know, you haven't asked these questions about, let's say, childbirth or about women's work. Eventually, people said, oh, my gosh, those are really interesting questions, too. You don't have to be a woman to ask them. It just so happens that men didn't ask them. And so I think in some areas, having religious people, having people with libertarian perspectives, having conservatives, it really does open up questions that have, that are productive. Someone will say, what, do you want Nazis? No, I don't want Nazis. You don't want Flat Earth people in the geography department. But there's a long way between a department that defines itself in, let's say, Marxist terms or in anti-colonial terms and Nazism.

• 37:27Speaker 05

  There's a lot of other things there that can be asked that don't get asked in some colleges and universities because of ideological conformity. Universities would be stronger if they were more intellectually diverse because we learn more from people with whom we disagree than from people with whom we agree.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  Is that to say that you think the university should be a place where people sometimes feel uncomfortable? And if it is, and I think we both believe that it is, how do you distinguish productive discomfort from actual harm?

• 38:01Speaker 05

  It's a good question theoretically. It's, I don't find, no, no, I mean, I don't find it that hard, actually, you know, like.

• 38:11Speaker 04

  A lot of people seem to.

• 38:13Speaker 05

  I know, but I don't believe them, frankly. Like yesterday, my grandson was sitting there, he's six years old, and he says, he finds out that there's a button in the car that somebody pushed by mistake and his seat got very warm, you know, a seat warmer. So he's looking at that button, he's thinking, what if I push it by mistake? And he starts getting upset, because what if my, what if my foot hits it? And their proper answer is like, just calm down, basically, right? Because he's not really being harmed by that button. I've had to say to students, and I know not every, my colleagues don't always agree, when they'll say to me, I don't feel safe, I'll say, you are safe. And they say, I don't feel safe. And I said, that's really not my problem.

• 38:56Speaker 05

  My problem is if you're not safe, that's my problem. I had a student years ago wanted to ban someone from graduation. This guy had done some stupid stuff, and, and he was punished for it. He said, but I don't want him at graduation. And to me, that was like, he wanted a scalp, he wanted the trophy of saying, I had him banned. I said, no, I guarantee your safety. If you don't want to come, that's about, it's up to you. We had a speaker this year who had a controversial inquiry about trans issues, especially about gender-affirming care for young people. She hadn't taken a stand on it, but she had explored these issues and the real controversies around them.

• 39:40Speaker 05

  A group of students came and said, we think you should cancel this, because I think you're doing actual harm. And I have said, our duty is to protect the vulnerable, like trans students and immigrants, undocumented people. I've said that publicly many times. So they said, well, Ken Roth, protect us. I said, I'm not going to protect you against somebody who's asking good questions. You don't have to go if you don't want to, but. No. But if there's somebody who's harassing a student, intimidating them, harassing them, I want them kicked out.

• 40:46Speaker 02

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• 43:05Speaker 04

  Let's zoom out from this a little bit because there's a more fundamental question that we've wrestled with on this show. And I don't normally have a university president here, so I want to ask. And the question is, what is college for, really? Should we think of it primarily as a way to get prepared for a job? Or should we see it as something much more than that?

• 43:31Speaker 05

  I believe that college is for three things. The first thing is to discover what you love to do. I think that that can be in a community college, it could be at a trade school, it could be at a liberal arts school. But to have the freedom, not to, I don't say discover your passion, because that sounds so psychological. I think it's actually what stuff you like to do that makes you feel alive when you're working. And so I think it's so important for students to have the freedom to to make that discovery. Because, you know, at a selective school, they say, well, I got A's in this subject, but they may not like doing that.

• 44:13Speaker 05

  Or where they've never tried, fill in the blank, you know, engineering, or they've never tried astronomy, or they've never tried poetry. And so a place where they can discover the kinds of things that give them meaning when they do those things. I mean, I think that's the first thing that a college is for. The second thing a college is for is to make the person who's discovering what they love to do, get much better at what they love to do. And and we can do a better job of that. I mean, the great inflation drives me batty. I feel like he's feel like a the old man that I am. But I think we we need to kick the students in the butt. Because a lot of the time, they think they're pretty good at something, and maybe they're pretty good,

• 44:57Speaker 05

  but they can get a lot better. And so I think it's really important that every student go to a school that's going to make them work really hard. And it's so against the grain of American consumer view of higher education, which is it should be this time in your life where you get to, you know, have so much fun. You make your friends, you get married, have a lot of sex and blah, blah, blah. And that's fine. I that's discovering what you love to do in a way. But I think they should go to a school where there's a there are people around you who are making you get better at what you love to do. The third thing is that you learn how to share what you've gotten better at and you love to do with other people.

• 45:40Speaker 05

  And that usually means often means selling it, actually. It means getting a job where you can continue to practice the things you love to do and that people will pay you for doing it. People say, well, I just got I love poetry, so I sit in the basement and write poems. No, no, no, no, no. I mean, you've got to get better at it, and then you've got to be able to take it out into the marketplace, out into the world. If you have those three things, discovering what you love to do, getting much better at it, and then learning to take it out into the world. Finding a job where these things can not going to be identical, but they can be aligned. That I think is a way that college can help people thrive long after they graduate.

• 46:23Speaker 04

  Are colleges still doing that? I mean, we talk a lot about AI on this show. I know you think about it as well. You've talked about it. There's always been a debate about the exact value of higher education, what the point of it is. That debate feels especially live in the age of AI as more and more work and learning is being automated. How do you think about this as the president of university like Wesleyan? Do you worry that AI is a threat to the model that you just described?

• 46:55Speaker 05

  It can be a tool for the model I just described. I mean, I use AI all the time when I'm trying to find out information about things or get various takes on an issue. I think it's really helpful, but I do worry that the joy that I've tried to describe of thinking for yourself in the company of others or discovering what you love to do and getting better at it, that you might just not have that experience because you can outsource it to a bot. Now, take athletes as a counter example.

• 47:36Speaker 05

  If I say to somebody on the football team, you know, instead of hitting that guy or running laps, why don't you just get a video, like get, just play Madden or something, you know, just do, or go on and have a very good AI version of football. Put your immersive thing on and you don't have to play.

• 47:57Speaker 05

  They will look at me, I think they'll look at me like I'm crazy because it's an embodied practice. It's not just watching football. Now, the question, I think that the hard question that you're pointing to is, do people want to think? Or will they be happy if AI thinks for them? I believe they want to think if you invite them to think and give them that experience of thinking with tools and figuring out where they themselves stand on any particular issue.

• 48:28Speaker 04

  I think people want to think, but if you make it too easy for them not to think. They'll take it. I mean, we just a couple of weeks ago had a journalist, James Walsh, who was talking about college students who are using AI to cheat.

• 48:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:41Speaker 04

  And the way he described cheating is so widespread at this point and so hard to detect that it's sort of throwing into doubt what it even means to earn a college degree at this point. You're not just a president, as you said, you're also a professor. I don't know if you're experiencing this in the classroom. Are you seeing this?

• 49:03Speaker 05

  I am.

• 49:04Speaker 04

  Okay. I mean, does that worry you?

• 49:07Speaker 05

  It worries me. It definitely, it worries me. But I find it's interesting. In my class, this moral philosophy class and others, I have them write something every week in relation to the reading, usually just a question about a quotation. So occasionally I'll see one, it's so, you know, it's good and it's coming from a guy who sits in the back with the hoodie on and is like, doesn't want to be called on. I say, oh, must be AI. So and I call on Max and I say, what, what, you know, what do you mean when you ask this question about Virginia Woolf? Very confident that he doesn't know what the hell it is. And he blows me away and says some very interesting things. So I can't tell. I can't

• 49:48Speaker 05

  tell when it's being used. So what I'm going to do this year is I'm going to actually have the students have dialogues with AI about the issues in the class. And then they're going to have to talk about it in discussion groups orally themselves. I'm not totally sanguine about this. I'm not, because some people are better than just speaking out like orally than others. I want people also to have the experience of working things out on a page. I'm not sure exactly how I'll get that now. I mean, that's going to, that's going to be a challenge. But I do believe that we as teachers need

• 50:26Speaker 05

  to encourage students to think for themselves with others around them. And that's going to be easy, much easier to do in a seminar, you know, in a small discussion class, you'll be able to tell than in a large lecture class. That I think will present some real issues.

• 50:48Speaker 05

  But I I do worry that

• 50:53Speaker 05

  the invitation to think for yourself is an invitation to work and to be uncomfortable and to find your your notions challenged. And some people will avoid that more easily because of AI. Other people, because of AI, will actually encounter things that make them more uncomfortable and make them think harder. So my job as a teacher is to invite students to think for themselves in a way that encourages them to do so, that actually gives them the appetite, enhances their appetite to do so. And if I can't do that, I'm not a good teacher.

• 51:32Speaker 04

  The whole thinking for yourself thing, I mean, that's what a humanities, that's what a liberal education is supposed to be.

• 51:38Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 51:38Speaker 04

  And, you know, I've heard administrators, I've even heard professors trying to defend the humanities in market terms, right? Like, just talking about the transferable skills and all that sort of thing. And and I really hate what gets lost in that framing. I mean, do you worry that the case is being made too defensively, always in terms of skill or utility, rather than this intrinsic value?

• 52:02Speaker 05

  I don't worry about that so much. I've had my arguments with folks like Stanley Fish always tells me, you know, I'm I'm giving up the game if I if I say that it's useful to do humanities. And I'm a pragmatist, so I think if it's not useful, it's probably not worth doing at all. It just depends how you define usefulness.

• 52:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 52:22Speaker 05

  I I'm not naive. I don't think that you should study poetry for four years and then we don't care about what job you have. I care that they get good jobs when they graduate college. To not recognize that they have to work in the world and that their education should be relevant to the work they do, it doesn't have to be the same as the work they do, but that it should be relevant to the work they do. I think that's a that's a that's an easy one. I think otherwise, it's just, it really is just an education for those people who don't have to work. And that's a different kind of education.

• 52:53Speaker 04

  There's another story in the news, I'm sure you've seen it, about Indiana University. Where something like a hundred academic programs are being suspended or eliminated. And the Republican governor there, the explicit justification is that this is about reorienting our programs so that it's more practical and geared towards better workforce outcome. But when you look closely, you see what's also going on here, which is an attempt to control what's being taught and purge programs that are deemed too ideological. I just wonder what you think when you see something like that.

• 53:38Speaker 05

  Public universities are in a very different situation than I am. I have a board that, you know, they're very supportive. If they weren't, they'd fire me. In a public institution, you have to deal with politicians who aren't as devoted to the university as typical members of Board of Trustees at private institutions, because the politicians have lots of other competing interests, not just universities. What they're doing in Indiana is so terrible, especially because Indiana has such a great public system for so long. And you can reform it. I mean, look what the president of Purdue did a few years ago. I mean, he really changed the direction, the economics of Purdue.

• 54:22Speaker 05

  And he's a conservative guy, he's a Republican, and that can happen. But it happens in talking with faculty and thinking about the educational purposes of the university. This wholesale closing of programs without giving the faculty a chance to figure out what will benefit students' education in the long run, I think is a horrible thing.

• 54:49Speaker 05

  People are very bad at determining what students should learn and that it'll be practical in five years. Eight years ago, all these people were telling me, "Michael, you should require everyone to learn coding at Wesley."

• 55:01Speaker 04

  Learn to code, right?

• 55:02Speaker 05

  Learn to code. What a bunch of bullshit, right? Now, no one's going to learn that. AI will do that for you. This idea that they know what's going to be practical in five or six years is, I think, really wrong-headed. We need students to learn how to think. How to work hard, how to be creative, how to work with others, how to serve something in the public. All of these things can happen through a variety of subjects. Politicians don't know what the future will hold. They should allow the university to decide within its budget how to organize itself.

• 55:33Speaker 04

  Just on a more personal level, obviously, this is your job, but lots of people have your job and they're not showing up on my pod. You could have stayed quiet, you could just run your university, but you've put yourself out there. You've decided very publicly to defend universities, to defend liberal education. Why? What makes this fight worth having for you?

• 56:08Speaker 05

  You know, my, my parents thought of, I think, college education as a sign that they had achieved a certain amount of economic security, they could afford to send their kids to college, whatever college was. I mean, that, you know, it didn't really mean a lot to them. For me, as a student, it really was discovering a kind of freedom that I still enjoy, that find profound, gives my life meaning, I mean, in so many dimensions.

• 56:48Speaker 05

  As a teacher, I have seen students of all kinds, you know, from all walks of life and the various places I've taught, use the opportunity for education to connect with people in very different ways than they would have otherwise, to discover resources in themselves that they never knew existed, and to really thrive as human beings in ways they would not have without the education.

• 57:21Speaker 05

  And I know this because they tell me. Some of them tell me like around the time they're graduating. Now I have students in my classes whose parents were my students, you know, many years ago. And I think that is, it's a great gift that America gives to many different kinds of people in many situations. In other words, they're not all like Wesleyans. It could be, my wife teaches in the prison in Connecticut, you know, and she has students who tell her, this is when I feel free, when I am, when I'm studying literature in the Wesleyan prison program. And I just think that that's why authoritarians hate it so much.

• 58:02Speaker 05

  Because what you experience in an authentic education is you experience being free. And then it depends, what are you going to do with that? Well, how are you going to build on that? And, you know, the threat of AI is that you won't experience being free. You'll just, you know, press some buttons. But that experience of freedom is extraordinarily fulfilling and something great to build on. And so I want to defend it because I believe so strongly in it.

• 58:32Speaker 04

  Michael Roth, you've got a big job, a lot to do. I appreciate you being so generous with your time.

• 58:38Speaker 05

  Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to talk with you, Sean.

• 58:48Speaker 04

  All right, friends, I hope you enjoyed this episode. As you can tell, this is a topic that's very close to my heart. I used to teach. I love the university. I love the idea of the university and I am worried about what's happening to it and where it's headed. But I appreciate Michael's perspective and I'm very thankful that people like him are out there making these arguments. And I hope you got something out of it as well. As always, we do want to know what you think. We listen to everything you send in. We read all the emails, so keep them coming. Your notes help us make a better show. Actually, here's a voicemail we just received that I really appreciated.

• 59:35Speaker 07

  Shawn, hello and thank you for your show. I'm responding to your latest episode, Hopeful Pessimism. Uh, your guest Mauro Vandelek sparked me to realize that so much of my existence in almost 69 years on this planet have been steered by the various forms of pessimism and optimism exhibited by my mother, father, grandmother, and the church that they grew up with. I'm also aware, again, thanks to this great episode, that I have been optimistically rebelling, uh, from their attitudes, etc., and trying to find my balance between these two poles of optimism and pessimism.

• 1:00:16Speaker 07

  Today, I believe I must look for the nuances that allow me to hold pieces of both sides, possibly intention, while creating a peace of mind in myself. It's definitely a conscious journey to find this hybrid stance that does not swing to extreme poles of life from the world around me. Thanks, Shawn. Keep it up.

• 1:00:41Speaker 04

  John, if you're out there listening, I am grateful for that note. Thank you. If any of you want to learn more about Hopeful Pessimism, that episode is right before this one in our show's feed. Okay, now it's your turn. Tell us what you liked and maybe what you didn't like about today's episode, or just tell us what you think about what's happening in higher ed right now and what you would do if you were president of a college or university. You can drop us a line at the gray area at vox.com, or leave us a message on our new voicemail line, LikeJohn, at 1-800-214-5749. And once you're done with that, go ahead and give us a rating and leave a review so

• 1:01:26Speaker 04

  other people can find the show. This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Iala, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.

• 1:01:40Speaker 04

  New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays. Listen to every single one and tell all of your friends and family members and their friends and family members. It's really the only viable path to enlightenment that I am aware of. The Gray Area is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to vox.com/members to sign up. And if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.

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