In middle school, President Michael Roth ’78 was obsessed with the rebellious figures of the late 1960s: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, the Yippies. He begged his dad, a furrier who commuted from Long Island to Manhattan every day, to buy him their books.
“Those commies?” Roth said, recounting his father’s words. “I’m not giving them any money.”
But his dad came around.
One night, on his way home from the fur factory, he stopped at a bookstore near Penn Station and bought “Steal This Book” and “Do It!” for his son.
“He put them in a brown paper bag,” Roth, who has been serving as Wesleyan’s president since 2007, told me. “That way, no one could see. And he hands them to me and says, ‘I don’t want to tell you what to read. You want to read these books? Read them, just don’t bring them to school.’”
Roth brought them to school the next day.
“My parents really did encourage me to think for myself,” Roth said.
Decades later, that same instinct—to read the books, to speak up, to not be afraid, and to encourage others to do the same—still animates him. As Wesleyan’s president, Roth has become an unusually outspoken defender of higher education in a moment when universities are under siege by political leaders eager to score points by casting higher education as elitist and adversarial. While many of his fellow university presidents have stayed quiet, including Columbia University’s interim president who has since stepped down, Roth has stepped up.
His op-eds have appeared in Slate, Time Magazine, and The New York Times; he’s been interviewed by MSNBC and profiled in outlets such as The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The American Prospect; he’s been cited across the political spectrum: Not because he really wants the spotlight, but because, as he puts it, he’s willing to speak.
“I call back,” Roth said. “I’m the free speech guy.”
We sat in his office on a bright afternoon, the windows open to the crack of the bat and the cheers from Dresser Diamond. Books lined every wall—philosophy, history, art theory—and his desk was covered in a familiar kind of academic chaos: five mugs, cups, and water bottles, all exhibiting the Wesleyan logo, jostling for space among piles of paper and handwritten notes.
“I’m a little neurotic Jewish kid from Long Island—afraid of everything,” he once told The New York Times. He laughed and looked around as I repeated the line.
Roth’s modesty seems real, but it’s at odds with the role he’s come to play. As political pressure on universities intensifies, driven by culture war rhetoric, threats to federal funding, and escalating attacks on academic freedom, he has become a rare figure among university presidents. Roth is willing to speak clearly and publicly in defense of the entire higher education system, not just his own institution, all while the Trump administration has pulled funding from top schools, detained and deported international students for participating in protests, and investigated other institutions for their diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
“There are some others speaking up,” he said, referencing the presidents of Delta College, Mich., Princeton University, N.J., and Trinity Washington University in Washington, D.C. “But the real story shouldn’t be ‘Why aren’t we defending ourselves enough?’ It’s: ‘Why is the government attacking one of the most successful sectors of American society?’”
Roth acknowledged the potential consequences of being outspoken.
“Some friends have told me, ‘Don’t speak out—what if they go after our school?’” he said. “It won’t be the president who suffers. Maybe they’ll raid the groundskeepers or the dishwashers or something. I do think about that.”
But as he saw it, the attacks coming from the administration aren’t just about politics; they’re also existential.
“If we give up those freedoms for money,” he said, referencing the federal aid Wesleyan and other schools rely on, “then even the money we do get won’t be useful, because we won’t have the freedom to use it in ways that are best for our students.”
He estimates that Wesleyan receives about $20 million annually in federal support.
“About two-thirds [of that support] is student aid, and a third of that is Pell Grants,” he said. “Then there are grants and federal programs that matter a lot, not just for the University, but for the scientists who receive them.”
So why risk it?
“Because if we don’t speak up, it’s going to get worse. Much worse, much faster,” Roth explained.
In his interview with The American Prospect, Roth described this dilemma as collaborationist. He reiterated this point in our conversation.
“Imagine you run a restaurant and the Nazis take over your city,” he told me. “At first, they say, ‘You can’t serve Jews,’ and you say, ‘Okay, because I don’t want my waiters to lose their jobs.’ And then they say, ‘You can’t have any foreign waiters,’ and you say, ‘Fine, I’ll fire them too.’ Pretty soon, you’re appeasing them every step of the way. But it doesn’t work, because the other side just keeps wanting more and more power.”
What’s happening now, Roth insists, is not the usual partisan squabbling.
“For a long time—under Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan—you might get criticism for a radical student or a controversial professor,” Roth said. “But no one attacked the system as a whole. That’s what’s happening now. And I think it’s shameful.”
That system, Roth argues, is what made American universities the envy of the world: publicly funded research, thriving campus culture, and an independent intellectual sphere.
“If someone in the current administration had a sick family member, they’d want to go to Boston Children’s Hospital or [Massachusetts General Hospital], or any university-affiliated hospital, because they know that’s where they’d get the best care,” Roth said. “To destroy that system now would be catastrophic.”
And yet, many institutions remain cautious: too cautious, in his view.
“I’ve tried to organize some presidents, but it’s not really happening yet,” Roth said. “People are afraid to provoke the wrath of this administration, which is extremely vindictive.”
Roth said that he has received hate mail from those who disagree with his principles, including disturbing messages referencing his family.
“There were even emails about my mother that I didn’t tell her about,” he said.
But there’s been far more encouragement from both alumni and parents, including a recent letter published in The Argus.
“Our teachers would be proud of you,” a former classmate recently emailed him.
Roth has also been working to build unlikely alliances, especially around free speech.
“I used to be critical of a group called the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE),” Roth said. “I thought they leaned too far right. But right now? They’re among the fiercest defenders of people like Mahmoud Khalil.”
Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student detained by federal agents earlier this year, has become a central figure for civil liberties advocates.
“I wrote to FIRE and said, ‘Hats off—you’re doing a great job,’” Roth said. “We may even do something together.”
Roth doesn’t pretend there are easy answers. He knows the system is imperfect. He’s candid about the frustrations of students, the limits of protesting, and the delicate process of dealing with campus leadership. But he insists that the freedom to listen, speak, and disagree remains non-negotiable.
That instinct to speak out and stand firm has shaped Roth’s public persona, but it’s also contributed to a more complicated reputation on campus. Roth has often been cast by student activists as prickly, dismissive, and needlessly combative.
Still, there’s a certain consistency in his approach. He does not try to please people, and you always know where he stands. He disagreed strongly with the students who established the encampment on campus in solidarity with Palestine last year and demanded that Wesleyan divest from Israel in support of Gaza. Many protesters directed their anger at him and the administration. But despite the criticism, he upheld their right to protest, allowing them to set up tents and demonstrate without interference from Wesleyan administration.
As a student in the 1970s, Roth invited the far-left philosopher and political theorist Herbert Marcuse to Wesleyan’s campus, where he spoke in defense of radical protest.
“I remember we were crossing the street to the Science Tower. It was a busy street, and Marcuse said, ‘You should shut it down,’” Roth recalled. “I asked, ‘What do you mean?’ He replied, ‘Sit in the street. Shut it down. There shouldn’t be cars on campus.’ I thought, Wow. That’s so cool.”
Having also joined demonstrations against nuclear power and apartheid in South Africa, Roth understands the importance of protesting.
“I’m proud of students who make their voices heard,” Roth said. “I don’t always agree with everything they’re advocating for, but that’s the point. I want to make sure freedom of assembly and freedom of speech are key elements of campus life.”
Now, as Wesleyan’s leader, he’s still protesting, but with a very different platform.
“I think it’s important to call out abuses of power when you see them, and that’s what I’ve been doing,” he said. “We live in a time when the politics of resentment are so strong…. It’ll get worse if you don’t call it out.”
Just days later, I watched Roth step in at the last minute to speak at the Hugo L. Black Lecture Series, joining journalist Emily Bazelon for a conversation titled “The Fate of Free Speech in the Trump Era.” Onstage, he picked up where our conversation had left off.
“It shouldn’t matter if they’re coming for you; You should protest because they’re coming for others,” he said during the lecture.
As my conversation with him wound down, Roth reflected on the mentors who shaped him. He spoke about professors such as Richard Rorty, Carl Schorske, and Natalie Zemon Davis, who taught him at Princeton and whose lives bridged scholarship and activism.
“I admired those people,” Roth said quietly. “They inspired me. I’m not doing what they did, but I hope I’m doing something in their spirit.”
Maybe that spirit traces back not just to Wesleyan, but to a furrier father in Massapequa Park, N.Y., handing his son two banned books wrapped in brown paper and saying, with something like love disguised as indifference: Read them. Just don’t bring them to school.
And the kid brought them anyway.
He’s still bringing them.
Ben Shifrel can be reached at bshifrel@wesleyan.edu.
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