Saturday morning, we sat down with Michael Roth to ask him about his trip, his personal experiences as a student, and his plans for Wesleyan come fall. Note that the interview is edited for brevity and clarity.
Greg Dubinsky: I was thinking about the focus of your work while you were speaking [in the Memorial Chapel on Friday], this idea of freedom through work. I almost felt like I was reading Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. [Editor’s note: This is a book written by a philosopher, Alexander Kojéve, whose correspondence Michael Roth edited.]
Michael Roth: (Laughs) Oh goodness gracious, that’s right, you’re on the inside.
GD: It was interesting to me to find out a bit more about that, and how you would connect that idea to practical outcomes and issues such as chalking or the independence of departments, or how that translates into practice.
MR: I think the way it would play out in specific Wesleyan policy or around Wesleyan issues is something I don’t know enough yet about to comment in an interesting way. Someone gave me a box of chalk yesterday and my daughter immediately grabbed it thinking it was for her. She said, can I play with this? “No!”
What I was trying to say yesterday in regard to freedom and work was that the education at Wesleyan taught me that there was a way one could work that was an expression of what one hoped to be. And getting a sense of that as a social scientist, a biologist, a musician or a writer, whatever the field, gives one a sense of human capacity and a feeling of freedom that sets a platform for how one wants to work after graduation. One wants to find a way of working in the world that is significant for oneself and one sees making a contribution in the world. And there are lots of ways to do that. It doesn’t have to be through some narrow prism of academic work or narrow version of activism. So the contrast I was trying to draw was between that and the kind of work where one feels alien to oneself. Work that most people have to do in our culture. Which is, it may be monetarily satisfying, or not, but you don’t feel like yourself when you’re at work. What I learned at Wesleyan, from doing it myself and from looking around at people who were joyful about what they were doing, was that there are ways of being dedicated to a pursuit that allows you to discover who you are and what you want to be and how you can make a difference in the world.
Autonomy of departments, I don’t know. I don’t know enough about what that means at Wesleyan. I’m not a departmentally oriented academic. I can say that. It’s probably pretty clear from what I’ve done. I don’t believe in the silos of academic departments, I think that requirements are bad. I learned that here—we debated that endlessly when I was a student. I think it’s great for students to have the freedom to choose the kinds of courses they want to take and to make their own way. Sometimes that can be within a structure. If you’re a music major, there’s a structure of how to progress, or [also] if you’re a biology major. Sometimes it can be much more self-generated, as I had a University major. I think the key is that you are following your passion and you are discovering what you love to do. My sense is that the reason a lot of students become so loyal to Wesleyan is that they really do discover what they love to do here. Then they get better at it and that’s great fun and exciting. And they make friends around their work and sometimes through their work. And that’s a gift I believe. As a result, students may be critical of the University, because they want it to be even better, to provide that all the time or in a deeper way, but they are also incredibly loyal to the University because of that gift, because of that experience. I hope that begins to answer that question. Six months out, your successors can expect a more detailed answer.
Eric Lach: It seems people were pretty pleased with your talk yesterday in Memorial Chapel. I’m wondering how you set out to write your introduction?
MR: (Laughs) I didn’t write anything, I didn’t know what I was going to say. I do have this, I don’t know what to call it, maybe it’s a symptom, maybe it’s a tick, maybe it’s a style. I do like to improvise. I guess I learned that at Wesleyan. I took jazz piano lessons here from a wonderful instructor.
Justin gave me a couple of points, to thank so and so. And I looked at those in the afternoon, and then I was thinking in the afternoon, “What am I going to talk about, what am I going to talk about, this is too important, Roth, to do your typical improvisation.” In San Francisco, I do a lot of public speaking, and it’s like a dog that can sing—“Gosh, he’s improvising again.” And I enjoy that and people seem to like it. But I thought this is going to be webcast, I can’t say, “Whoa, I didn’t really say that.” “Yes, you did!” And I kept wondering if I should write it down, I heard the voices of authority saying, “You should write it out, you’re a writer.” But I really felt like the energy would be better, and everybody said it should be brief, if I just said what came to mind.
So, I thought, okay, as you know, I spent a lot of time with Hegel at Wesleyan and since, so I do think in threes. So I thought: if I have three points in my head I won’t get lost. And then it just occurred to me when I saw the police car in front of South College as we were getting photographs, I thought, “Okay, I’ll do liberty, equality, and fraternity.” So then I was a little nervous, because I thought, that’s all I knew that I was going to do, talk about freedom, equality, and, when I teach I translate “fraternity” into “solidarity” or “community” because I think it’s the contemporary expression of that ideal—it’s not sexist. And I remembered when I had this notion of freedom and work, which was here at Wesleyan, so I thought it would be fitting to say that, but I didn’t know what I was going to say. And my wife said, “I think you have four things, because you put diversity in there.” But I didn’t think of it until I said it. So last night I listened to it on the web just to see what the hell I said! (Laughs)
And being in a chapel, I’m a wannabe rabbi, people say, or preacher, and so when I get in a chapel I’m even more inclined to [just] see what happens. So the process was really to come up with the structure of three things and then see what happens. When you’re playing jazz or rock and roll, it’s even simpler, you need a three-chord progression. If you know you are going to do A, D, and E, you’ll see what happens.
EL: So we shouldn’t expect a reign of terror next year, though, right?
MR: I did think of that. Somebody might say the Nazis said, “Work makes free.” So there are lots of incredibly oppressive versions of these ideals. But that’s true of great ideals—some people distort them into horrible things. And that’s something to be mindful of. But I don’t think it’s a reason not to be idealistic, it’s just a reason to be thoughtful.
GD: It seems that part of the definition of freedom is having the capacity to affect one’s environment, and maybe a corresponding obligation to affect one’s environment in a positive way. I’m wondering what your thoughts are on Wesleyan’s connection to Middletown and how that might play out in your administration?
MR: I heard really positive things about how Doug Bennet and Midge Bennet have built partnerships with Middletown. And I want to understand that better. My own interest and values lead me to want to develop connections for the students and the institution with the city we’re a part of and the state we’re a part of. I think it’s really important for students to understand not only the campus they’re on, but the city they’re in, and the political context in which they live—beyond the campus. That would mean like service learning, which I know has become more important at Wesleyan over the years, but it also means project-based curriculum, which interests me a great deal. Where students can actually take classes, the content of which is heavily inflected by practical projects in the world, and that can be in a science class or in a political science class [or others].
I think that participation is a key value in the arts, so students learning how to not only perform for spectators but to engage people into participatory art-making is a really interesting experience and very educational, and it also is great for the people who are invited into the mix of making. And I’ve done all those things with colleagues in Claremont and Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco, and I would expect to find opportunities to do that here. I haven’t been to the Green St. Center yet, but I understand it’s a really interesting place and I’ve gotten notes from people who work there and I look forward to visiting it. And there may be other avenues for that connection to happen, and I would certainly be very supportive of developing those connections. They’re not just expressions of altruism, which is not a bad thing, but they are really vehicles for learning—for students, faculty, and staff. One of the things you learn is about citizenship and being part of the community, which I do think is connected to the values I talked about yesterday.
I muck around on the guitar and piano, it’s not something I can do unless it’s a really good party, but playing a little bit changes the way you listen, and dancing a little bit changes the way you watch, and I think that’s a very important experience to have. The practice of creativity, the practice of thinking, changes the way you understand what people who are experts in the area say.
GD: Should there be a mandatory commitment to civil [or] civic service?
MR: There could be, you know that’s where you would no doubt detect a contradiction, if I wanted that, because I don’t like mandatory commitments. I have in the past thought about that. At other places like CCA my first thought was, “We have requirements, why don’t we have a service learning requirement and why don’t we just hire people that teach that way,” but it was the wrong thought. Because what happens when you make things a requirement is that people aren’t interested in them. So I don’t know if requirements are the answer here. I kind of doubt it, just given a little of what I know so far. But making it really great is what draws people, and then they’ll want to do it. Again, I do think sometimes structure is important, but my prejudice is to not go to that structure too early. Invitations are better than force.
EL: So you mentioned yesterday at the student talk that you had been involved in a takeover of the president’s office. I was wondering what you were protesting.
MR: Oh, God, did I say that? That had to be improvised. We were protesting apartheid. The reason I hesitate is because the other big protest I was involved in was—well, less involved with when I was here afterwards—was Seabrook, New Hampshire, a very hot issue in the late ’70s. The nuclear power plant at Seabrook gives me food for my political philosophy classes today.
EL: So you guys took it over for a day, or a couple of days?
MR: No, I don’t think it was a couple of days. I remember it was probably a day, a day or so. It would be, I guess, ’77-’78, that year. I remember President [Colin] Campbell coming in and being very gracious. What happened was, and I think this is what we wanted, is that it became a conversation about how to engage the issue at the university level. I’ve learned about it since and talking with people about [how] what the University did in regard to divestment in companies doing business with South Africa was really an engagement with those companies, forcing them to explain themselves in a public way, because as stockholders you had this kind of leverage, which if you just sold your stock you’d no longer have. So it was a very interesting process, much more sophisticated than I understood at the time. Part of it came out of the fact that there was a community revulsion against the regime in South Africa—it took longer in a way, but I think in a way it was a more significant action of engaging these companies, forcing them to respond to these political and moral issues.
GD: So success can be a difficult thing to define for many at a university like Wesleyan. I’m wondering: how would you measure [the] success of Wesleyan while you are there? Would you rely on the U.S. News and World Report? What would be the criteria that you would use to measure how you’re doing, where you can improve?
MR: There are a couple of things. It’s a really important question, and I want to determine in the next few months which metrics would be the most important and to use them. Everyone seems to agree that Wesleyan is underresourced in regard to its competitors—the endowment per student is not as high as it is at Williams and other schools. One very important goal for the future, that the Bennet administration has made very good progress on that needs to be continued and accelerated, is to bring more resources to the University. A key metric for me will be successful fundraising. I think we talked last time about doubling the endowment. It seems like a good goal to have. I don’t know how much time it will take to do that, but in the first year I’ll know how much time. We should double the endowment, and part of that will be from intelligent use of the resources, and part of it will be from bringing new resources, a combination of those.
One of the really important aspects of that is that it will allow us to provide more access to people. I think one of the things that I didn’t make clear in my remarks yesterday—I listened to them last night—is exactly where would equality come out in policies. I think access to Wesleyan and access to universities like Wesleyan is a really important issue in the United States and internationally. A university like Wesleyan can’t be a place for only rich people. Need-blind admissions is really very important, but nonetheless the preparation you need to be successful in the admissions process is clearly very biased by class, at least—other things too, but class plays a big role. To have a university like Wesleyan make the contribution to opening up this dream of great education to more talented people who don’t have the advantages of education earlier on—that’s the question. I don’t have the answer yet. And I don’t think Wesleyan can do it alone, but I do think Wesleyan should be a leader in this area, and Wesleyan should work with other institutions to create avenues for success for people—whether it’s for middle school or high school —to give them the preparation so they can go to an elite university—that could be Wesleyan, Harvard, oh, Williams wouldn’t count—kidding!—but, you know, to play a role [in] making education function not just as a way of supporting privilege but as a way of giving access to the kinds of values I talked about yesterday. Bringing resources is going to be important to do that—you need money to do that. You’re not going to take it out of the current program, that’s impossible.
Another measure will be who wants to come to Wesleyan. I want the applicant pool to continue to grow. It grows nicely. We have incredibly great applicants. I looked at the profile of the class coming in—it’s incredibly impressive. Let’s take the things we like the most of the applicant pool and let’s say, “How do we improve those things by five percent to seven percent per year?” Make it really hard, actually—it’s a tough goal to reach. The demographics are going to flip soon. Right now you don’t have to be a genius to get more applications because more people are at that age, but in a few years that will change. So how does Wesleyan know people are finding out how great the place is? More people want to come here. More people, not just in Boston, New York, and this corridor, but in San Antonio, Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco—they say, “Oh, Wesleyan, that’s the hot school, that’s the place. I want to go here.” You know that not just from a newspaper article or something, but from how many qualified people are trying to get in. I’m not trying to expand the size of the student body, [but] it’s a good way of seeing how the message is getting out in the world. And the more the message gets out in the world, the better it is not only for the metrics, but for the people with a Wesleyan diploma, because people just value it more and more in the world. It’s already valued very highly, of course, but more and more people will value it very highly. People who know about education know about Wesleyan, but that’s only one group of people. As you move toward the Midwest and the West, the school is not as well-known as it should be, and certainly there’s been progress there—more applications from California and elsewhere. That can accelerate. What is the level of student satisfaction? That’s a metric that’s very important. I’m not sure what the best tool for measuring that is yet. Retention is very high, but Wesleyan is in a way beyond retention. You don’t just want to retain people, you want them enthusiastic and excited about being here. How you measure that—it’s harder to measure, but we’ll figure out some way to measure that. Faculty engagement and satisfaction. Are you able to hire the very best people? When you do a search, do you get the first choice? I think we do most of the time—I can find out what the number is, but we obviously have to be even better. We’re not so close to perfect that we can’t be better in that. But how do you retain people, how do you reward them for the great work they do? That’s another metric.
Those would be some of the more easily measurable things. The partnership with the city, the role in politics, is harder to measure. I do think there you get to issues of identifying stakeholders—people whose opinion about the place you care about—and somebody other than the president will find out: how do they think we’re doing? Don’t ask Roth’s mother how he’s doing, ask the mayor of Middletown, or the senator, or people who are running the community health center. Once you identify that constituency pool, you identify people whose thoughtful evaluation of performance you take into account. So those are some of them.
EL: So there’s a popular sentiment on campus that Wesleyan every year is getting less “weird”—the key word. For some reason the students have this image of the ’70s, when you were here, as the weird time, that Wesleyan was at its weird peak. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how Wesleyan was “weird” or how this label to some extent got put on Wesleyan?
MR: (Laughs) I don’t know. That’s a good question. I didn’t think we were weird. I’ve heard this—I don’t know how popular it is. American education has gotten more corporatized—it’s not just Wesleyan, look at the country. But at the same time, there’s a kind of not just tolerance but an acceptance of diversity and of self-expression and experimentation that now—it’s taken for granted at Wesleyan. It wasn’t like that in the ’70s. It may have felt weird to people [then] because people were more likely to have led sheltered lives before they came here and be surprised by differences in sexual lifestyles or identity or politics or other things.
I think now people perhaps just take a lot for granted in terms of the embrace of difference within a community. Last night after the student reception, I was invited to dinner at Open House—I didn’t know what that was. I think it’s great. I don’t know that when I was a student that that would have happened with the president. I think it might just not have happened. And so that’s a good thing. The fact that it’s not weird that they asked, or that someone said, “Ooh, that’s weird,” or something. I think that’s good, actually. “Yeah, I’d love to go to dinner there, let’s talk about this or that.” It would be a mistake to put too much of an emphasis on idiosyncrasy—to search out idiosyncrasy for the sake of idiosyncrasy—that seems kind of childish to me, actually. Sometimes there are real principles at stake, and you want to make sure that people have a certain level of freedom and have a certain level of respect, and those are really important issues. But to test those standards for the heck of it—that seems to me not very interesting. There are real issues out there that people violently disagree with off campus—starting with affirmative action, or the war, or any number of issues—take the politics where it matters, I would think. And Wesleyan could be the place where you get the tools to do that, or to learn about it, to have good arguments—not just good arguments for people with like beliefs, but how do you have a good argument or a reasonable conversation with someone who doesn’t share your views? That’s different from trying to get someone who shares most of your views to go on the edge because you say something so upsetting that even they can’t accept it—that seems puerile. So, “Keep Wesleyan Weird?”
I think that Wesleyan has been for a long time a place of serious experimentation—that’s different, I think, from what I’ve just described as childish—serious experimentation, where people are passionately devoted to exploring new territory—and the place where it comes out most importantly is in their work. They’ve thought about stuff in ways no one else has thought about it. And the teacher turns to the student and says, “You talk about this. Let’s read your poem. Because you’re doing stuff I haven’t thought of.” That happens at Wesleyan. Or you do an experiment that creates new knowledge, or you put on a theatrical production that moves people so tremendously that they are stunned. That happens at Wesleyan. That’s experimentation.
Is it weird? Yeah, it’s weird, but it’s not pursuing the bizarre, it’s creating the new. So everything I can do to help students and faculty create the new, sometimes through exploring very old things, I really want to do—but the culture of shock, or of testing, I think it’s a bit of disservice actually to the culture of serious experimentation that Wesleyan has been known for. I mean, “serious” seems like a stodgy word. Norman Brown was here in the ’50s, and Carl Shorske and Bucky Fuller, John Cage—talk about weird, right? but they were pioneers. They were changing the way people felt about education, sexuality, culture, music, and silence—they were breaking barriers, and working very hard to do it—joyously, it wasn’t just testing.
GD: What’s the thing you think you know the least about, or the thing you want to learn the most about?
MR: (Laughs) There are so many. It’s hard to just say one. I guess the one at the top of my list right now is the sciences and the science building, because it’s a very important issue for the institution going forward. I’m really looking forward to learning more about scientific practice as it is now taking place and how people imagine it will be taking place 10 years from now, because I just don’t know that much about it, and as a cultural historian, I should know more about that, and it’s a really important part of understanding the world and at Wesleyan. It’s a really good thing to learn more about it, and I’ve asked the provost to send me things—research papers and articles. I love being a student, as you can tell, and this is my way of going back to school in the sciences. That’s really on the academic front.
And then—I always talk in threes—on the student side, I really want to understand why students come to Wesleyan today, what is the draw today, and what is it that makes Wesleyan compelling to somebody before they come and how they experience the school in relation to their expectations. And that’ll just be going to the dorms, or the houses, and listening to students talk about their expectations and experience—that will be fascinating for me. I could see the enthusiasm of people for the place yesterday, and now I want to find out what’s the content of that. And then the third one would be the relationship of the campus to the city, the region, and the state. Just getting a handle on that will be important to me as someone leading an institution that can make a real difference in the city and the region.
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