Michael S Roth
@mroth78
16th president @Wesleyan_u, (grand)father, husband, author, professor. Opinions my own. Advocate for pragmatic #LiberalArts #LiberalEducationMatters #GoWes
My new book explores how we invest so much in students because we want them to be learning freedom, to think for themselves in the company of others. #students #HigherEd #History @wesleyan_u
Michael S. Roth @mroth78 on his new book with Yale Univeristy Press, The Student: A Short History! #education #students #history
Read @AmbPressman on neutrality illusion “They cling to the illusion that they can preserve their independence and integrity while making deals with a strongman, just as Hungary’s elite believed they, too, could emerge unscathed.” nytimes.com/2025/07/23/opi… via @NYTOpinion
Grateful for @adamgopnik “Rembrandt shared with Spinoza at a minimum the sense that there’s nobody here to straighten things out but us. We leave our good acts behind, and they alone may be immortal. The best we can do is do well, and bear witness” newyorker.com/culture/critic…
Read @MargaretRenkl “We have seen what a great hue and cry can do to stop threats to our public lands. We have seen what happens when we force our elected officials, foundations and donors to acknowledge our love for them.” nytimes.com/2025/07/21/opi… via @NYTOpinion
Frank Kendall III “Fear is the universal tool of authoritarians, and it is a clear sign that our democracy is in danger that so many Americans now have reason to fear their government.” nytimes.com/2025/07/21/opi… via @NYTOpinion
Read @DavidAFrench “It’s hard to describe how thoroughly Trump is disrupting and corrupting our system of justice. At every turn, the pattern is the same. His friends catch a break, and his foes get the boot.” nytimes.com/2025/07/20/opi… via @NYTOpinion
Read @MollyJongFast “I got that sometimes our country loses its way. But I never thought I would someday live in an America that looked quite so much like my grandfather’s Cold War nightmare.” nytimes.com/2025/07/18/opi… via @NYTOpinion
Read Meghan O’Rourke “With ChatGPT, I felt like I had an intern with the cheerful affect of a golden retriever and the speed of the Flash.” nytimes.com/2025/07/18/opi… via @NYTOpinion
Come on, people, Trump wanted @colbertlateshow canceled & @NPR defunded because of very real concerns about #ViewpointDiversity in late night TV & early morning radio. #neutrality @Harvard @wesleyan_u @ACEducation @StephenAtHome @TheFIREorg @NewYorker @nytopinion @MollyJongFast
What to make of people who "decide to write about anything but the one thing all...people are thinking; or worse still, who, out of cowardice, bolster the occupants' plan to make it appear as though everything..continues as it did before." #HigherEducation libertiesjournal.com/articles/stayi…
.@vcunningham “a constant sandstorm of casual lies and destabilizing ambiguity keeps obscuring important facts—the kinds of facts atop which a constitutional republic, ruled by self-governing, notionally informed citizens, is supposed to be built.” newyorker.com/culture/on-tel…
Yes. Writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. Writing *is* thinking. Students, academics, and anyone else who outsources their writing to LLMs will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.
Great @giakourlas celebration of an exceptional dancer: If her final “Swan Lake,” a mix of simplicity and penetrating feeling, was especially riveting it was because within her Odette-Odile was Murphy, the person.” nytimes.com/2025/07/21/art… via @NYTimes
Mazel tov!
In unrelated news, the best human being on the planets is marrying me on purpose!!
Read @FranklinFoer on fighting to give renewed practices of freedom a chance. “even Orbán never dared anything as heavy-handed as what Trump is doing to Harvard.” @TheAtlantic theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
Earl Warren on educational freedom: “No one should underestimate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth. To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges & universities would imperil the future of our Nation.”
But some will read those books, and so it is our duty, our gift, to help them make discoveries through those works. That’s something to hold onto in these dark times
what may be profoundly different is education. where once I could assign novels as lengthy & as complex as "Moby Dick," "Madame Bovary," "The Possessed," "Crime and Punishment," "The Brothers Karamazov" to undergraduates (U. of Windsor, Ontario) now I could never assume that…
Very much like the assault on #highered We must use or freedoms to defend our freedoms
In this clip, @ErinBurnett of @CNN asks how I am handling the pressure on media. My answer: We have freedom of speech and the press. We may pay a price for exercising it. Our job is to accept that, humbly do the best work we can, and make sure we can defend it.
In this clip, @ErinBurnett of @CNN asks how I am handling the pressure on media. My answer: We have freedom of speech and the press. We may pay a price for exercising it. Our job is to accept that, humbly do the best work we can, and make sure we can defend it.
.@GMUPres The mission “includes the belief that diversity includes thought, background, and circumstance and any attempt to artificially redefine our diversity, as one of race-based exclusivity, is doomed to fail no matter who ends up being excluded” insidehighered.com/news/quick-tak…
“The point is to inhabit the position, not the person,” Serpell writes. Instead of feeling someone’s pain, you try to grasp the larger mechanisms that cause someone to suffer. Rawls & Arendt were preoccupied not with feeling but with fairness” nytimes.com/2025/07/18/boo… via @NYTimes
