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How do we repair our academic institutions without tearing them down entirely?

Trust in universities has cratered, ideological divisions are deepening, and the future of higher education is hotly contested. Today on Heterodox Out Loud, host John Tomasi welcomes Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University, historian, and esteemed thought leader on liberal education, for a frank and probing dialogue.

Drawing on recent Gallup polling data, Michael and John examine the collapse of public trust in higher education, particularly among conservatives, and the orchestrated efforts across the spectrum to delegitimize academic institutions. Michael discusses the double bind facing universities: the hard-won gains in gender, racial, and religious inclusion overlaying a stark decline in viewpoint and ideological diversity among faculty and students.

The discussion traverses the enduring tensions between diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and the imperative of open inquiry. Roth critiques both anti-elitist grievance-mongering and the insularity of academic circles, arguing for an educational environment that prizes rigorous debate, intellectual pluralism, and genuine mutual respect. Together, Tomasi and Roth confront thorny questions: How do universities maintain their relevance in a polarized society? Is the narrowing of acceptable discourse stifling academic innovation? And what role should university leaders play amid mounting political interventions and societal pressures?

In This Episode:

•  Declining trust in higher education due to perceptions of elitism and delegitimation
• Grievance politics influencing perspectives from both the left and right
• Reduced viewpoint and ideological diversity among faculty members
• Overreaching DEI initiatives leading to unintended consequences
• Structural barriers hindering ideological pluralism in hiring and admissions practices
• University leadership's role in managing political pressure and rebuilding trust through debate

About Michael Roth:

Michael S. Roth, a historian, curator, and advocate for liberal education, has served as the 16th president of Wesleyan University since July 1, 2007. An alumnus of Wesleyan (Class of 1978), graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, before earning a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 1984.

Before returning to Wesleyan, Roth held several prominent academic positions, including president of the California College of the Arts, associate director of the Getty Research Institute, and founding director of the Scripps College Humanities Institute. His scholarly work focuses on how individuals and societies interpret the past, and he has authored numerous books, such as Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters and Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses.

A vocal proponent of academic freedom, Roth has been recognized for his defense of higher education institutions against political pressures. In 2025, he received the PEN/Benenson Courage Award for his commitment to upholding the independence of colleges and universities.

Follow Michael on X: https://x.com/mroth78

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Michael Roth, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Michael Roth: Thanks very much, John. Good to be here.

John Tomasi: It's really, it's a special pleasure to have this chance to talk with you. I've joked with you in the past, though it's not completely a joke, that one of the things I admire so much about you is that you have a way of being heterodox, even about heterodoxy. You're one of those, you're one of those campus leaders who we've learned so much from. You find your own way, you're an independent thinker, you have distinctive views about academic freedom at this moment, and we're just really delighted to have a chance to talk with you and have you talk with our members.

Michael Roth: Thank you, and thanks for the good work you're doing.

John Tomasi: Well, let me just begin by asking a general question. So there was, in 2024, a Gallup poll, which I'm sure you're familiar with, you've all been talking about it, showing the dramatic decline in trust by the American public in higher education. And in 2015, something like 57% of the people polled across the country expressed a lot or quite a lot of confidence or trust in American higher education. 10 years later, by 2024, that number 57 had gone down to 36. People use the word cratered for that big of a drop. Among Republicans, that's among all respondents. Among Republican respondents, the cratering was even stronger, from 56% to something like 20%. So this is sort of a background to the world we're finding ourselves living in now. Do you have any thoughts about, did you read that poll when it came out? I just wonder what thoughts you had when you saw that or heard about that poll. That was, again, in 2024.

Michael Roth: Well, I wasn't really surprised, I think, for two reasons. One, that there's been a decline in trust in American institutions. And although that's a precipitous fall for higher education, which was not seen as particularly partisan for much of its history. Not always, of course. But there's just a general decline of trust. So if you look at the numbers for the Supreme Court or for the judiciary, generally dramatic decline in trust. Congress envies our numbers, so journalism, right? I don't know. I don't know if there's a poll for podcasting yet. Ten years will probably be a pod. I used to like those podcasters, but now there are too many of them. So part of me was skeptical of the trust barometer. And on the other hand, you know, Wesleyan is still a tuition-driven institution. And so we need students that really want to come there.

John Tomasi: Sure.

Michael Roth: And families to have trust in what we do.

John Tomasi: Wesleyan's one of our most elite liberal arts universities.

Michael Roth: Yes, it is. It is. And we have also to attract students because it's a liberal arts university. And, you know, less than 10%, 8%, something like that, of students really want a liberal arts education. So if you did the decline in trust in liberal arts, I don't know. I don't know if there is such a poll. So part of me was not surprised because there's been not an organic decline of trust or legitimacy in American institutions. This is an orchestrated attempt by especially the right, but not only the right. There's some forces on the left to do this, too, to think delegitimation is the best weapon in the culture wars. And so and part of that is orchestrated in this kind of sounding conspiratorial, like, you know, it's a political thing, but it is a populist political move. And but another part of it is it sells. I mean, delegitimation attracts eyeballs. And so if you're going to have a nice puff piece like people of my age, you know, 68, I like StoryCorps on Friday mornings on NPR. But, you know, what people love to see is some institution taken down, some person taken down.

John Tomasi: Right.

Michael Roth: And the more precipitous the fall, the more attractive it is on social media and and other vehicles for our attention. So I think there's a lot of this is is part of a broader story. And then in particular for higher education, there really has been among Republicans in particular, a decision that attacking we know they know that attacking elites is good politics. And American higher education is built on this ladder of exclusivity. So, you know, Michael Crow is the exception, but but at Arizona State, but most places they think, well, the more selective I am, the better the product, the better the experience. And so elitism has been our our coin of the realm in a way. And anti elitism is a much more powerful currency. It's the Bitcoin to keep the currency metaphor going. So that so there's there's there's there's that as well. Maybe I just add one other ingredient to this, which I've been thinking about the last few days, really, which is when if you look at this marketing tool, the Edelman, a trust barometer that, as I recall, I don't have it open in front of me, that the number one reason for a decline of in trust in any corporation or sector of the economy is grievance.

John Tomasi: Right.

Michael Roth: And I found that I only learned that a couple of days ago looking at their website. Grievance is is is is such a powerful tool. And I think. There has been an effort to have many Americans feel that they have been excluded from condescended to buy elites at these at the best in the quotations, American colleges and universities. And so you certainly see this in the rhetoric of the president and his closest advisors. Of course, they went to these schools, but they they feel a sense of grievance and resentment that that they have then broadcast widely to the culture. And we have participated in this. And sometimes it's the only learning outcome we can point to.

John Tomasi: Right.

Michael Roth: It's like we don't have we we can say, where did you go to school and where you are in the pecking order is going to determine a lot of stuff.

John Tomasi: Right.

Michael Roth: In our social relations. So I do think that we've contributed to this.

John Tomasi: But can I ask you about grievance?

Michael Roth: Sure. I just want to say one last sentence.

John Tomasi: No, no, please. Please.

Michael Roth: That it's much easier to destroy trust and to build trust. And and so I'm trying to figure out that. So what what would it take to restore some trust? But go ahead. I'm sorry. I go.

John Tomasi: No, that's good. That's that's exactly what I want to ask you about. So a grievance can be flamed. A grievance is a flame that can be fanned and made bigger. But it's not a flame itself. It's something something started the flame. And I just wonder what you if you would say something about that, because I agree with the trends you're describing. I think that's quite a fair and accurate description. But I'm still just wondering how you see the underlying cause, if there is one. And just one just one thing I'll just mention that you've written about before. And HXA talks has often talked about from the beginning of HXA almost 10 years ago now. This this decline in ideological diversity on the faculty. And as you know, in the in the 60s, the ratio of left to right leaning professors self-reported was about two to one. Now it's something like 18 to one. That's probably generous. I'm on the junior faculty. It's even steeper than that. And some measures something like 40 to one. You know, on grad students, maybe even steeper. So that I'm not sure that I'm not sure that's the cause. That's that's the flame that that change of ideological direction. But I wonder if you could say something about that. You've written this. You've written so many interesting pieces in the last last few months. Just fascinating, fascinating work. Free speech matters. And so does DEI. I want to talk with you about DEI because your views are of great interest to us and our audience. But one of your pieces is called in U.S. Education News. I'm sorry, in the Wall Street Journal. Our universities need diverse ideas, not ideological auditors. So there's kind of two parts as often with a Michael Roth piece. There's more than one thing going on. Do you think that that ideological, that the piece of ideal, the piece of that fact about the decline of ideological diversity within universities? And I'm sure you've seen at Harvard part of the whip that they've been hit with is this, these stats showing that something like 90, 90 plus percent of the professors at Harvard lean left. What do you think about that? Is ideological diversity the flame that allowed this grievance? Conflagration to get going?

Michael Roth: I don't think so. I mean, I've been associated with heterodox academy because I am concerned about it myself that the lack of, I call it intellectual diversity, is an educational problem, just like the lack of other kinds of diversity is an educational problem. And so I do think it's a real problem. But I don't know. It may be for some conservative politicians who felt like they couldn't get a date in college or something. Maybe, maybe, you know, there is some grievance there that they felt marginalized. That's, you know, speculating on motivations is a challenge. I usually do it anyway, but.

John Tomasi: It's a podcast. That's what we do.

Michael Roth: I actually think the grievance in this case, the cultural grievance, there are two things I'd like to say about it. I think, and many people have pointed to that, we're in a culture where grievance really pays. To have a grievance is morally elevated. Now, the right was very critical of that when there was a kind of what we used to call the oppression Olympics, right? The conservatives were like, oh, I'm a Jew. Oh, you're a Jew, but you're a white. So, I'm a black person who has even worse history than the Jew. And, oh, you're a black person, but I'm a black disabled person. Oh, really? But I'm, you know, that kind of thing. It really was taken up by some sectors of folks who thought of themselves as progressives, for sure. And I think it was really pernicious for a lot of reasons. I mean, I think it was a kind of the cultivation of sympathy is a good thing and of empathy. I think that's a good thing. But the rejection of privilege or the rejection of achievement is a terrible thing. And so, the famous privilege circle, you know, people take a step back if they had this thing or that thing. And so, the best person left is the one who suffered the most, right? That kind of moral philosophy is, I think, pernicious. But the grievance side on the right has been that the exposure of racial discrimination and especially racial, in the United States, racial discrimination above all. And to some extent, homophobia, but that really made some white people really angry. And that...

John Tomasi: Some white people.

Michael Roth: Sorry?

John Tomasi: Some white people.

Michael Roth: Some white people really angry because they thought, wait a minute, I earned my spot. You know, I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say, oh, a white man can't get a job at... And you look at the stats and the 30% of the people there are 30% to 40% are white men, which is about what it is in the population. But when you're used to having 95% of the professoriate or other highly paid people being... 90% being white, the fact that it's only 25% to 30% is shocking.

John Tomasi: Right.

Michael Roth: And so I made this joke when I did the plenary heterodox meeting in Denver that I think I said, I haven't seen this many aggrieved white men in one room in a long time.

John Tomasi: I was there.

Michael Roth: I was glad you were laughing. They did not laugh.

John Tomasi: No, I was there. I just started as president. And I thought that was an amazing talk. And because I think that just...

Michael Roth: And I get it. Like, I didn't enslave anybody. That's the view, right? I didn't do it, you know? And yet you are part of a group that has benefited from the racial hierarchies in this country. Right. Those two things can both be true, right? As an individual, you didn't do anything. And at the same time, you are the beneficiary of a system. So I think a lot of this blowback, and you see it very much in the Trump administration, is that we don't want people in the present, individuals in the present, paying a price for the history from which they benefit, but they're still individuals in the present. I actually think that's a coherent worldview, and my view is these folks won the election, and they're actually allowed to say, we think civil rights is about colorblindness and not about history, not trying to redress things from the past. I disagree with that myself. It's not my politics, but my folks lost the election. So I think that they can, that seems to me like the rejection of the anti-racist view of civil rights in favor of the colorblind view seems to me like that's what the elections are for. You just, you get to decide those things. But I say all that because I think that a lot of the grievance against higher education is that higher education, especially since George Floyd, really embraced the anti-racist view, which is that colorblindness is a form of racism. And that even well-intentioned folks who are trying to be fair are actually, because of their intersectional biases, I mean, we can throw all the words around, that they're actually doing harm. And I think that many Americans, and not just white Americans, found this an assault on their individuality and on their ability to succeed in the world.

John Tomasi: Good, good.

Michael Roth: So I think that that's a big part of this. I don't know how many conservatives are, well, are wanting to go to graduate school in political science and feel excluded, or English. I mean, as when I talk to a conservative about this, they say, why conservatives are too smart to sign up for an eight-year dissertation and start, you know, and be an adjunct professor somewhere and make $62,000 a year and a good year. But 50 years ago, that wasn't the case.

John Tomasi: So let me just reset the question, if I may.

Michael Roth: Please.

John Tomasi: At HXA, we look towards the future. We'd like to think, what university are we working toward? What should our goals be together? How do we move forward to make our universities as amazing as they might be? Every institution throughout all of human history has always been in a process of becoming. Nothing's fixed. And universities, from HXA's perspective, are very much that way. So, you know, as you know, at HXA, we say things like, we love our universities and we want to make them better. Or we love them enough that we're actually going to insist that they be better because we really care about them. And you share that too, I know. But just one little, but we look forward, we often look back and try to get a sense of the accomplishments. Because I think those are lost sometimes. And just one stat that I like, you've probably heard it from me before. The last Ivy League school only began graduating women in 1987, which is the year I graduated from college. So, to me, it just seems like yesterday. That's a remarkable fact about exclusion of women in higher ed. We've had great university systems in the past. Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Chicago when it opened at the turn of the 20th century. Johns Hopkins and so on. But none of those universities, they all excluded people dramatically. They excluded people based on gender, on race, based on class. They pursued the truth and knowledge in many ways. And they were fabulous for those reasons. More power to them. But by excluding people, they undercut their possibilities of their own success. And with HXA, what we see is that over the past 50 years, we've been embarking on an experiment, attempting to do inclusion on a scale that no university system in the past has ever attempted. And in my view, we've kind of been making a mess of it because we're human beings. So, it's not that surprising. But I'm still just trying to think. And at the same time, is that increase of diversity happened with women and also Jews that have been discriminated against historically. Muslim Americans only began arriving on our campuses in any significant numbers in very recent years. We're having a whole new forms of diversity and inclusion present on our campuses with great potential. If we care about learning from each other with different views, great potential to go forward. But I just sort of wonder what you, and of course, on the other side, there was this decline of ideological diversity. Are those two things connected?

Michael Roth: Yeah.

John Tomasi: Do you, how do you, I don't know, just to speak frankly, I feel like we need to take viewpoint diversity in an ideological sense seriously as one piece of moving forward. Do you see it that way? Do you see the decline of ideological diversity as a problem? Or are you saying that that's just a grievance view that some people have and it can be wholly explained that way?

Michael Roth: No, I, I, no, I think it's a real problem. and, and it's a challenging problem because of the, the, the commitment that our professors have to their own biases. And, and, and that our admissions staffs have to their biases and, and, and, our student life staff have to their biases. I think this is their commitment to their biases. That's what I think people don't even know, even know they have biases. We just go ahead and act on them, but you just got to be committed to them. But they, they'll defend them ferociously. So I was just in a meeting at Johns Hopkins yesterday and, with, AEI American Enterprise Institute. And I really wanted to listen to, especially some of the conservatives who were there and critics of the university. and, you know, there are a lot of conservatives who, who, who, if they have gone on to, graduate study, they'll, they find their way to think tanks and other organizations outside of the academy where, and that's just its own problem. Cause the think tanks tend to, you know, have be siloed, in one way or, or another, but the university, you know, almost by definition, this would be anti silo, right?

John Tomasi: Yes.

Michael Roth: And so, at this meeting, someone said to me, well, Michael Roth, you've been writing about the need for more ideological diversity and your faculty, you know, it was almost 10 years now.

John Tomasi: Yeah.

Michael Roth: How's it going? You know, and, and, and I can, I could talk about all the good conversations I've had, but she said, how many conservatives have you hired? I had two. now that's of course, I don't really.

John Tomasi: Is that a real number? Is that, is that a, is that a real number? Did you say two?

Michael Roth: You know, it's, it's, it's hard, it's hard to, it's harder to know, right? Because, people don't have to disclose.

John Tomasi: Right.

Michael Roth: And like a woman, you know, you're hiring a woman, et cetera. but I, I, so the progress that I see, which is painfully slow is that my, many of my colleagues in the faculty now see this as a problem. That wasn't many students see it as a problem. So, you know, there've been articles in the student newspaper in the past year, that calling for more ideological diversity by students, they almost always preface that by saying, but I myself, I'm on the left.

John Tomasi: I know.

Michael Roth: But, but nonetheless, they do say this. And I've convened groups, I've written about this. I've convened groups of conservatives, students to ask them, like, do they feel beleaguered? Do they feel discriminated against? Well, I have this, this person who kind of trolls me on, on Twitter who says, you know, I preside over a, almost a Maoist, the homogeneous faculty. And he cited this, a student article in the newspaper, which said it was like Russia with so much ideological conformity. And they noticed that they were aware that Mao was not from Russia, just to be sure. You know, everybody, you just take your totalitarian and you mix them together, I guess. But anyway, so I, I, I, I reached out to the student and I said, well, come on. I mean, first of all, you couldn't, you, you wouldn't write this in Russia. You'd be in jail. and, and, but how, what's it like? And we had a really good conversation. It's, it's, it's not easy for her because she has views that are different from her, from her many friends. But, you know, she, she, she would like more ideological diversity. but I take the glass hair full. Like, that's really great that she's writing in the student newspaper that, you know, 12 years ago when a military veteran wrote against Black Lives Matter, they, they, you know, they harassed him. They threw the, they threw his, the newspaper in the garbage. It's much better, but it's so far to go because, the grad, as you pointed out, the graduate schools themselves have this ideological, filtering. And I, I think some of it is, the, the, the kind of thing that where, where people of a certain temperament and open, at least one would hope openness to change and new ideas who say not so conservative then because they're not so concerned with preserving older ideas, gravitate towards the arts to, to the humanities. and so that there's some explanation, like I, you look at pediatricians in this country, they are very, tilt very much to the left. So is that a problem if your kid is sick? I don't know. I mean, I, I don't think so. So is it a problem that most members of the physics department vote for Democrats? I, I don't really think so, but I, I mean, but I do think it's a problem that most members of the government department, all of them, let's say, or the English department. It, I don't exaggerate the problem. I, I, you, you've probably heard me say this before. I teach Aquinas, you know, I'm not, I'm not a medieval, a person, let alone a Catholic. I, I, I try to do it wholeheartedly, you know, and, and, it's important to me that the religious students in the class feel that I am giving it a heart and soul when I talk about, Aquinas.

John Tomasi: But, but can we, can we pause on that? Can we pause on that idea just for a moment? Because about the pediatrician, for example, and I, I want, we, we talk about this a lot, the members and I, and the team at HXA, what, what's the ideal of ideological diversity? So we think diversity is important on a whole variety of dimensions. One example that one of my favorite examples is, is how U.S. history and my, on my reading, the discipline of U.S. history was fundamentally changed in the seventies and eighties and nineties by the arrival of more black scholars on campus. And before, before that arrival, U.S. history was often taught from the perspective, almost solely of the founders in Philadelphia meeting and doing their, writing their, writing their papers and the brilliant work. But social history, the history of unseen people, black people, for example, of those periods have been almost completely neglected. And in recent years, we've seen history, I think in part, because of more diversification on the campuses, we've seen history with some downsides, but with a lot of upsides to explore a deep understanding of the historical, the founding by bringing into picture and put focus on attention, putting attention on questions we hadn't even thought about before. So in pediatrics, there's a, there's a body of knowledge. It's not based on debate in the room between a pediatrician and the patient, for example, or the pediatrician in the room and some of the pediatricians somewhere else in the field of pediatrics. Of course, you want different viewpoints, but as you said, in the government, you would want to have more viewpoints. Can you say a little bit about that? I mean, I think the goal is, I'm kind of mixed about it. I think there's, it's an indicator if there's, if the dramatic, if the decline, if the decline of Republican professors or leaning professors is extreme as all the data suggests. That suggests to me that I don't think it matters that there aren't, they're not plant biologists. If the plant biologists are all on the left, I'm not sure that matters in itself. It may affect the culture of the university. If no one has a viewpoint of Delman party, but in some areas like history and others, like climate science, I think you want to have open debates. You want to have questions kept open in a lively way. They can't, they can't just have crackpots giving crazy ideas. They need to present theses about say, older models or hotter models, and then endure the rigor of that disciplinary methodology to say, well, that's a good argument or bad argument. So too with international affairs, we want to have people discussing a whole range of views of international affairs, not just liberal internationalism, which we see widely across that discipline. You also want to have someone defending American exceptionalism, for example. So that's kept open in a lively way. They don't get a free pass, the American exceptionalists, right? They get, you have to answer the questions of the, by the disciplinary standards of international affairs. And just one, another example, public health and public health. If there's a consensus on during a, during a, a pandemic that vaccines or vaccine mandates and masks and closing downs of things are, is the right thing to write approach. That's okay, in my view, so long as people who are at the Great Barrington Declaration and other kinds of contrary views can be expressed and discussed and not just being attacked. But what we see at HXA, and I think you see this too, I'm curious to hear how you see it. What we find in the academy now across a lot of these fields, like government, like public health, like international affairs, I can go on with some other ones too, is that maybe as a result of the conformity of opinion, ideas that are contrary, that are challenging, that we need to have a fuller, deeper understanding, are not even allowed to be expressed. Or there's no one there to express them. Yeah. So I don't mean to be pushing too much on this point, but I just want to, you know, we're trying to think about a university where people talk with one another, where they're not silent, as you put it a minute ago, but they actually are engaging with each other. Faculty members, and also faculty members with viewpoints from across the political spectrum. I'm not sure I have a question to this, but I just want to know, do you see diversity as important only in some areas? And if so, should that be an imperative for the great research universities to produce, find ways to recruit, and rebuild the pipeline so we have more diverse voices on the ideological dimension? Do you think we're doing okay? What's your take on it? Is it a crisis?

Michael Roth: Yeah, so I think that there's a lot there.

John Tomasi: Yeah, yeah.

Michael Roth: There's a lot there. So I can imagine that there may be some research questions in pediatrics that are not pursued because there's a real tilt to the left, or that orthopedic surgeons are nastier and more brutish because they're not. You know, that's like, I think those are the two ends of the spectrum in medicine. And, but I don't worry so much about that. I think, just as you described, that in some fields, there were just some questions that go unanswered or go unexplored, not just unanswered. And that's a real problem. What will happen, however, is people will differ on which ones are legitimate. So like you say in international relations, we should have someone representing American exceptionalism. Should we have someone representing German exceptionalism?

John Tomasi: Okay.

Michael Roth: I mean, no. Or, I mean, so some people say like, that's like saying in geography, we should have a flat earth person.

John Tomasi: Right.

Michael Roth: So there will be on the margin, some, like some dispute about like, what is really a legitimate question. But I think there's no, there's no arguing with, again, that, that we have, that we haven't narrowed the field of questions that we're asking because of our ideological homogeneity.

John Tomasi: You're saying that we have, you're saying that we have not done that.

Michael Roth: No, we have, we have narrowed it so much because of our ideological homogeneity. And that's a bad thing.

John Tomasi: Right.

Michael Roth: How bad it is. I mean, like, in other words, whether American exceptionalism should be in there or whether, you know, realpolitik versus high mindedness. I mean, I, I don't know what, you know, but it is very clear that some of the questions that conservatives have long posed in, let's say, political theory or history, sociology, God knows. I mean, it's, it had to go back a ways to find conservatives, that those questions are just not pursued because they're almost taboo. They're morally taboo, not intellectually discredited. And that's, I think that's a real problem. That's my argument, and I think it's, it's, you got, as I understand it, heterodox is a push, but that's my argument to my faculty that they should be aware of the ways in which they hire people who ideologically resemble them. And that, that's a bias, just like, you know, folks used to say, I'm, I like to hire women, but I can't find, you know, I hire the best people and they're not women. And so all those fields that you described, let's say in black history or in women's history, those, they went unexplored until we had people who really cared about those fields. They didn't have to be black people or women, but they often were, especially in the early days. And I think that's really true on the faculty. In my case, I had a person go to see me and say, you know, you're, you've written about ideological diversity. I am the only person who goes to church every Sunday in the, in the social sciences at Wesleyan.

John Tomasi: Right.

Michael Roth: And he saw me like doing my little Rolodex to think if I could think of anyone. And I thought he was right, actually. And I was able to figure out a way to, to give, he was already there as a visitor and to make that a more permanent, a permanent appointment.

John Tomasi: And so your point about religious diversity is another one of these elements where we have things to learn from one another and then, and our, our ability to understand the world we're living in, understand the range of views out there, not just for social, not just for civic engagement, but that's important too. But just in terms of understanding the deep questions about life, why we're here, what mean, what, where is meaning, where, where, where does value come from? Kind of look back to something you said just a moment ago about a couple of examples you gave about a flat earth society or the, the, which Nazi exceptionalism. The way I, the way I see that, I just want to see if you, this, this resonates with you. We think disciplines are really important and disciplinary methods mean something. And if you're going to make a claim in the academy on a campus about something like a flat earth or Nazi exceptionalism should be taken seriously, you have to. You have to be ready to make those statements and defend them in terms that are recognized by the relevant discipline. So if you go out there and say the earth is flat, want to argue for that, in my view, you should be free to say that, but we have no reason to take you seriously. And they should, you can give us some reason to take you seriously. So too with the Nazis, but then with among the views that could be taken seriously, then that's the question, right? How do we keep those options open in a lively way?

Michael Roth: Yeah. I mean, I think that is the question I, and I, I fall back on a kind of, you know, a Kuhnian paradigm approach to these disciplines that they've decided. This is Thomas Kuhn, the structure of scientific revolutions.

John Tomasi: Yeah.

Michael Roth: So that, that there's a, that there's a, a paradigm of acceptable questions and parameters, a belt of things. So, yeah, and, and, and you can't actually defend the borders of that with logic or empiricism in every case there, it's a sociological development. It's a language game, if we can use that phrase. And I think our language games are impoverished because we are too ideologically homogeneous.

John Tomasi: Interesting.

Michael Roth: And, and in some fields, it's, it's quite dramatic.

John Tomasi: I like that formulation. That's, that's really interesting.

Michael Roth: So, I, I mean, I, you know, I have, I have a department that, that says we don't want any ideological diversity because we're fighting against the system.

John Tomasi: Right.

Michael Roth: And.

John Tomasi: We hear that. We hear that from places.

Michael Roth: And I, I think it's, I think it, and I'm happy to have that debate with them. I haven't convinced them yet. But I, I, I am in a position to deny them appointments because I think it's, I think it's really wrongheaded. And they say to me, well, if you want us to hire Nazis, I say, no. Because the alternative isn't a Marxist or a Nazi, you know, that there's a broad range of things that have been excluded. If I give you one example on the admissions side, years ago, a high school guidance counselor said to me that if he had a student applying to places like Wesleyan liberal arts colleges, whose civic engagement was defending the rights of the unborn, he would counsel that student to not mention that in an application. And I challenged him and said, come on. He said, it would be professional malpractice for me as a guidance counselor to allow my student to mention that. And I think that's, that's terrible. And, and I've talked to my admissions people, but I assure me it wouldn't be that way at Wesleyan. And, and, and I, I think it's the, the proclivities of faculty members become over time, departmental culture, which becomes departmental policy. And the narrowing effect is, is dramatic. And as you said before, you're impoverished. You don't get to see certain approaches to meaning, significance, literature, history, because you're comfortable, you're too comfortable with your colleagues ideologically, which, which spills over into these other things. And that's why I've, I've stayed so interested in what heterodox academy does is because I think this is a real problem, whether it's related to the decline in trust is unclear to me. Although the statistic you gave in the beginning is, I think very telling, which is that the decline in trust among Republicans is much greater than among Democrats.

John Tomasi: It is.

Michael Roth: Which does lead reasonable extrapolation from that is that Republicans are especially angry at colleges and universities because they've been excluded, mocked, or disrespected. That seems to me a pretty good reading of the data. And I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it's really on us in positions of leadership at colleges and universities to make changes that speak to those concerns.

John Tomasi: I really appreciate that. Let me share an anecdote, if I may, just a story from my own, my own experience. I was a professor at Brown for many years, as you know, and I was a professor in a political science department at the time. When, the 2006, 2016 election happened. and I remember vividly being at a department meeting and before the meeting started, some of my colleagues in American politics went to the chalkboard and started doing projections on the election outcomes. Every projection they put up had Hillary Clinton winning by significant numbers, but they, so that what they put on the board on the chalkboard was I think four different scenarios about the strength of her victory, the size of her victory, and what that would mean in terms of the ability to push put through certain kinds of legislation. These are, you know, really high powered experts on American politics and they study campaigns and elections and teach it. And of course they were quite wrong. They got, they got it wrong. Not, not everyone was wrong. Some people saw some things happening. Musa al-Gharbi, one of our colleagues at HXA wrote what now seem to be really prescient essays about the shift of certain African-Americans and Latinos towards Trump, even though he was portrayed very differently in the media. But, but I just, I was just, I want to share, I want to share with you because my colleagues, I have so much faith and disciplines that my, and my colleagues were so convinced about this election outcome. And I'm going to submit something kind of embarrassing here online. I actually went to bed that night at the election, didn't watch the whole thing because I knew for certain that Trump was going to lose. I was watching that day and then I woke up the next morning and the world had changed. And that just, and I'm not sure to think about that. There's complicated reasons why the pollsters got that wrong, but it goes to what you were saying. A minute ago, I think about people feeling, well, you don't understand us. You don't, you don't see us. You don't, you're, you're in a bubble. This path dependency, we were allowed to hire each other because you're the experts. That's why we want you to hire each other. We trust you to be experts and take that seriously for us. That trust has not been borne out. I want to shift gears if I may ask, because I see the time is short. I want to talk to you about, about our present moment with president Trump in particular, but as a bridge to that, perhaps, I'd like to know what you think about. You wrote that piece that I just found fascinating that I mentioned before, free speech matters. So does DEI. You probably saw recently that Sally Kornbluth at MIT is apparently closing, closing, I understand she's closing their DEI office. She also was one of the first, MIT was one of the first universities to, first prominent universities to stop using DEI statements and hiring and promotion. What do you think about DEI? It rose up, it was attempting to do something that was beyond the civil rights paradigm. I think he has some sympathies to some things within DEI. Can you say something to us, what you think, what's living and what's dead in DEI, or what should be living and what should be dead in DEI? Do you want to speak to that?

Michael Roth: Sure, sure. I mean, I should be, I mean, I have contradictory views, I guess, or heterodox views of myself. On the one hand, I think the assault on DEI is largely motivated by a white supremacist ideology. That what really bothers people is that black people and brown people have gotten more attention than they used to get. And that the, and it's very clear in the current administration, anytime there's a problem they want to blame it on, find a black or brown person and blame it on, take black heroes' pictures off the walls. I mean, it's, it's so obviously racist that I think, I just want to start there, that to me that it's really appalling.

John Tomasi: I'm sorry, you're saying that some elements of the critique of DEI come from that source, or are you saying that it's the source?

Michael Roth: I think the energy comes from that source. Just like the energy for DEI came out of rage against police brutality and the murder, murder of black people by police officers, especially, you know, now five years ago, I guess. But the practice of DEI can, could, was cockamamie in many cases, use a technical term. In other words, the, the, the, the, I think Kendi's, anti-racist ideology, was meant as a acceleration of the civil rights paradigm from the sixties, but labeling Obama and Martin Luther King Jr. racist because they aspire to colorblindness, always seemed to me, wrongheaded, a commitment to eradicate racism. Racism was hard to disagree with, but, and I don't disagree with that. I think it's a, it's a worthwhile endeavor. and, but the, the kind of, incentivization of the, the, the industry of diversity, equity, inclusion led to some like just dumb stuff really that, that, that, that the trainings don't work, often don't work. they're the opposite, they're the opposite.

John Tomasi: Worse than that, they're counterproductive.

Michael Roth: Right. We now know. And, the easy recourse to systemic, the systemic, as my students always say, they seem to get this in middle school. They blame something on the systemic X discrimination. What they mean is it's, it's, it's, it's important, large and some, you know, and, and I, I just think that led to a lot of shoddy thinking. However, the reason we've been talking about diversity, intellectual diversity, I think diversity of life experience and cultural diversity, intellectual diversity is a really important ingredient and a successful education. And that fact that we added, it's not just a bunch of, you know, rich white guys in colleges and universities, I think makes the experience of learning much richer than it would be. Otherwise, the reason I think that, we should have a broader range of opinions in these departments is not because I share those opinions necessarily on the contrary. I, you learn from people with whom you don't share opinions. So I think diversity is a very important, value. And I think that, belonging is something that a feeling of belonging as part of a learning endeavor is very powerful. So, and I wrote about this in that piece that when you're in a classroom and I think, John, you, we've talked about this before when you're in a classroom, when you build a culture of friendliness, if not friendship or mutual respect, then you can really have better debates, you know, and it changes everything. Well, I actually all feel you're doing something together. That's what I, that's how I understand inclusion. and, it means like when I'm talking about, I don't know, something on, on race, I don't just point to the black kid and say, well, you tell us about this. Or, you know, which happened to my daughter in middle school in Middletown, they were reading middle school, believe it. They were reading Night and, Elie Wiesel's book and said, and the teacher said, well, you're the Jewish kid in the class. What do you think? Well, you know, I mean, you don't do that because you want belonging or inclusion and equity just means fairness. There's nobody against fairness. So, so I, in that piece, I'm just saying, we, let's not forget that we value diversity for good reasons. It helps us learn. We value belonging for good reasons and, and, and fairness. And I, the example I use in that piece is if, if somebody talks all the time in your class, you want to find a way to not let that person dominate every conversation. It's just not fair to everyone else. I mean, it's kind of, so it's my middle of the road approach to this thing. So I think that, so when I wrote that and I, I think I, in my graduation speech, I actually just reversed the order. Cause if you just put equity in the middle or first, I mean, people like all these things. What they didn't like was being told you must be a racist because you belong to this group, or you must be a victim because you belong to that group.

John Tomasi: Right.

Michael Roth: And, and recent years that got connected to an anti-colonialist ideology, which again, I think broadly, I think, you know, colonialism is, is a bad thing, but the anti-colonialist ideology where you'd have either, you must have, if you're not a victim, you're a perpetrator. Which we also saw in certain forms of feminism in the eighties.

John Tomasi: Sure.

Michael Roth: I mean, that's just, I think, bad thinking, it leads to bad outcomes. That doesn't mean I don't want to protect people from sexual assault. I do think sexual assault is a real thing and there are good ways to protect people in bad ways and punish perpetrators and bad ways of punishing them.

John Tomasi: Can I just jump in there just because I want to just change something that you said. I think you'll agree with me. I would say that I want to hear people say, feminists say things that are somewhat over the top. I want to hear people say really strong views about race. I want to hear people intelligently defend positions that are maybe outrageous and what things I don't think are helpful if we actually all adopted them. But the thing about DEI at universities was it was adopted by many universities as kind of the operating system of the university itself. So it wasn't just, maybe that's wrong, but that's how I see the problem about DEI in the university context that it was so all in. And administrations in particular went so all in that it wasn't a debate, wasn't a discussion. In fact, it was an operating system. And that's what I think many people found worrying.

Michael Roth: Yeah, I don't know. I just decided.

John Tomasi: Please.

Michael Roth: I don't know the landscape of universities as well as you do. But I think that what I worry about there in that statement is like the person who says a white guy can't get a job at Harvard when 35% of the professors, assistant professors are white men. I mean, I just worry that we exaggerate its pervasiveness. But when I say that out loud, I realize that's because I don't want it to be true. It might be true. It's not true. It wasn't true at Wesleyan. At Wesleyan, we have a very strong DEI group. What they do is that they help first-generation students, many of them who are black and brown, be more successful, especially in STEM, really. And that's what we do. And when we have anti-Semitism, that thing, we bring it to DEI. When we have, you know, sexual assault goes through our DEI. So it's very, it's, we had some of the training stuff that I think that I found problematic. But we didn't have it as a, that pervasive cultural thing you're describing. And so that's, that's just my hesitation.

John Tomasi: Okay. That's fair enough. I hate, hesitate at the end of this, toward the end of this conversation to raise this huge topic about President Trump and the current situation we're in. Maybe I'll, maybe I'll do it this way. You're one of the signatories to an important letter that was signed by many presidents that came out in late April, April 22nd, a call for constructive engagement. Can you say a little bit about that to you? And the question, I suppose, I'd like to have you hear anything you'd like to share. You can pick and choose any angle you want on this. We have now an administration that is taking extraordinary measures at universities, or many people say against universities. How do you see this? How do you see what's happening in American higher education and its relationship to this particular administration? Is there a possibility for constructive engagement? To what degree should president leaders, presidential leaders, university presidential leaders be looking into their own souls and trying to understand what they could do better? To what degree should they be leading a resistance and fighting a resistance battle and perceiving themselves as leaders of resistance as a way to protect their university? This is a big question, I know, and we don't have that much time. I'd just love to hear your, how should a university like you and your colleagues, how should they respond in these moments?

Michael Roth: Well, I think that those of us who've been trying to reform universities for a while should continue to do that. So the piece I wrote in the Wall Street Journal complained about ideological homogeneity at universities, but also said that Trump administration's assault is anti-legal, anti-constitutional, lawless. And so I think one can do both of those things. I worry sometimes that those of us who are asking to fix our own houses in this moment, a little, you know, like people who thought that Russians invaded Ukraine because Ukrainians were not doing something right, you know, or like we should fix our own houses. There is corruption in Ukraine. But is that really the issue, right? You know, so on the other hand, on the other hand, there are, the Trump administration is, and Trump allies, there are people who, who want to burn higher education down. They, they, they hate learning at that level. They think that it's corrupt. They don't believe in science, apparently. And, and they're really nihilistic about the possibilities for an educated democracy. And, and I don't think there's much you can do with those people except defend yourself. against their onslaught. There are other people, though, who I think would like to see the universities improve. And, and might recognize that America has done well when we've protected civil society's freedoms. That, and that doesn't mean you, you isolate civil society from the federal government. Often the federal government subsidizes things in civil elements of civil society, you know, religious institutions, through the tax code.

John Tomasi: The tax code for example.

Michael Roth: Yeah. But, but that doesn't mean you get to tell the, the preacher what he's going to say that Sunday. Or, you know, if you give a subsidy to a farmer, it doesn't mean you tell them where they go to church. So, I think these are very good old conservative picture of American freedom and civil society. And I, I'm trying to sound those notes because I do think that, I'm not sure President Trump has a coherent ideology in regard to this, which I, I take as a hopeful sign that he could, it could go in a different direction. Because the playbook that seems to, is being used right now is, is really right out of the authoritarianism 101, which is to attack universities, attack the press, attack law firms, attack these places of somewhat autonomous legitimacy, even if they're certified by the government in some way or protected by the government. And, and that, that is extremely worrisome. And I think we have to be on alert against this drift towards fascism. But I think the antidote in this country would be to appeal to really more traditional conservatives, as well as progressives who value our freedom, freedom to learn, freedom to teach, and freedom to welcome a more diverse group of people into our universities.

John Tomasi: It's been great talking with you at the, I'll see you at the conference in New York on June 23rd through 25th. And again, you'll be on the president's panel with Sean Vialoc, who did not sign that, the letter that I mentioned a moment ago, Jeremy Haefner from Denver, Brian Casey from Colgate, and Nadine Strossen, as I mentioned, will be the, will be the moderator. And we're so looking forward to having you with us there. You've been, you've been wonderful at previous HxA conferences, and we're just really looking forward to continue with this conversation. Thanks for taking time for this, out of your busy day to share your thoughts with us. It's been a great conversation. Thank you so much.

Michael Roth: It's been a pleasure, John.

John Tomasi: Nice to talk with you. Take care.