Project 2025 laid out the battle plan pretty clearly: Get rid of the Department of Education, shut off federal funding, take control of the accreditation system, and take down diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. And, in the end, change what students are encouraged to study and what professors are allowed to teach.
So why is this happening? And is it working?
Michael Roth is the president of Wesleyan University and the author of several books about college, including Beyond the University and The Student: A Short History. He’s also one of higher education’s most vocal defenders, and one of the few prominent university presidents willing to take a moral and political stand against authoritarian overreach from the government, which he sees as an attack not just on colleges and universities, but on civil society itself.
I invited Roth onto The Gray Area to talk about the political backlash against universities and why it matters. We also discuss where American universities have gone wrong, what needs to change, and what he thinks college is actually for in the world of AI. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You said recently that the federal government is “trying to destroy civil society by undermining the legitimacy of colleges and universities.” That’s a pretty dramatic statement. What do you mean?
I think it’s extraordinarily clear that the Trump administration is hell-bent on destroying civil society — that arena of our culture and our polity that has sources of legitimacy independent of the ideology of the person in the White House. You see that in the attack on law firms. You see it in the attack on the press.
The war on universities is similar. They’re not really going after universities that have egregious issues of civil rights violations. They’re going after the high-profile, high-legitimacy institutions like Harvard, like UVA, like the other Ivy League schools, with the exception of Dartmouth. They’re doing that because these schools have a claim on our allegiance or our respect that is not founded in the ideology of those currently in the White House.
When you say “destroying,” what do you mean? What is the administration actually doing?
Well, they start with easy things, right? Trans women athletes. There are fewer than 10 trans athletes in the country in NCAA varsity sports. That’s a winning issue for a variety of reasons. The White House is going to determine who plays volleyball, and then they’re going to determine how to teach Mideast or near Eastern Studies. They’re going to say, If you don’t teach near Eastern Studies the way we want you to with appropriate respect for Israel, then you’re not going to get money for Alzheimer’s research.
What happens is that everybody in higher education starts moving away from anything that might offend those in the White House. You have this slide from the university as fostering an oppositional culture, which it has in the United States for a long time, at least since the Second World War, towards the universities as institutions in which people with money, power, diplomas, and legitimacy start trying to anticipate what they should say to not annoy — or even to please — the president and his friends.
I don’t think President Trump really cares about Alzheimer’s research at Harvard, but he wants to make sure that people at Harvard — and then everyone who doesn’t have the resources that Harvard has to fight — line up. I think that’s why you don’t see a lot of opposition from colleges, universities right now because everyone has already started lining up.
As you know, a lot of people shrug their shoulders at all of this. They think, What’s the big deal? These campuses are full of privileged people with predictably extreme views, views that aren’t representative of most of the country, so who cares? To that sort of reaction, what do you say?
Well, it’s been an orchestrated reaction. I think that at UVA, the fastest-growing major is computer science and the fastest-growing minor is data science. Hardly the stuff of “woke” lunatics. At Harvard, the most popular majors are the ones that lead to Wall Street. Again, this notion that Harvard or UVA is filled with people with extreme views who are unrepresentative of America — they’re unrepresentative of America because they’re really smart.
“Yes, universities have real problems, but I don’t think that those problems are what has led to the assault on…the ability of schools to educate students the way they see fit.”
It’s unfortunate because in a democracy, you can be really proud of people who excel, even though they do things we can’t do. When I watch, I don’t know, Patrick Mahomes, play quarterback and escape a crazy rush, I’m filled with admiration. Or the elite fighters in the Navy SEALs or the Army Rangers — we don’t think of them as elitist, we just think of them as exceptional. But at some of these schools, we resent them for having created an environment where people like those guys can thrive and the rest of us don’t have access to it.
In a healthy democracy, you allow people to experiment with ideas, art, science, and politics, it’s never totally open-ended. Of course, there are always some guardrails. What we’re seeing now is a concerted effort to bring those guardrails in so that people have to resemble those in power. That is unusual in the history of the United States.
You used the word “orchestrated.” Do you think this is completely manufactured? Even if some of this backlash is cynical and engineered, and no doubt a lot of it is, how much have universities contributed to it through leadership failures or bad policies?
Yeah, it’s a fair question. Yes, universities have real problems, but I don’t think that those problems are what has led to the assault on free speech, on freedom of association, and on the ability of schools to educate students the way they see fit.
The problems of universities are political problems and we haven’t done a good job in solving them. Let me just mention two quick things. One problem is the ideological conformity or the ideological narrowness of faculty in most colleges and universities, especially at those like mine and the highly selective schools in the Northeast. All over the country, university faculty are mostly people left-of-center, and that has gotten much worse over time.
I think it’s about prejudice on the part of the faculty, not only prejudice, but that faculty members hire folks with whom they’re comfortable. They hire people whose political views they’re more comfortable with. I think that’s a problem that should be fixed by the faculty itself. They should be aware of their prejudices and counteract them as best they can. I think that’s a significant problem.
The broader cultural problem is that American higher education has defined its quality on the basis of the number of people that are excluded from it. We prize being highly selective. I used that phrase myself a few moments ago.
What does that mean? We reject most people who want to go there. That’s a very American thing. It’s not only American, but you want the thing you can’t get access to. That’s a traditional capitalist bourgeois fact that lots of people want the thing that they have trouble getting access to. Colleges and universities have cultivated condescension rather than democratic practices.
I think the basic problem that elite colleges in particular have right now is that people outside of these institutions increasingly think they are places where ideology has been confused with inquiry, where education has been confused with activism. Is this a problem for you? Or is this just what free speech ought to look like?
Well, I think it is both of those things. It is a problem when schools define activism or civic engagement in an ideologically restricted way. I think it’s an intellectual problem. I think it’s a moral problem for schools. I’ll give you an example. I gave a talk at a conference and a guidance counselor from a high school said, “If one of my students was applying to Wesleyan and she said her engagement was protecting the rights of the unborn, it would be professional malpractice for me to allow her to put that in the application.”
Now, I guess I was naive. I was shocked by that. That was to me a slap in the head that I needed because I have no reason to doubt that he was right. I think that’s the way in which the soft despotism of prejudice constricts free speech. I’ve been fighting against it now for the last decade or so, both as a person who has access to the media and writes articles about such things, but also as a teacher, adding more conservative voices into my own classes. I’ve always privileged the kind of mavericks and philosophy or political theory, but now I’m also adding to my classes criticisms of those voices or those progressive thinkers.
Students are totally capable of dealing with the issues. They may not on their own gravitate towards conservative critiques of progressivism, but once exposed to them, they’re perfectly happy and willing, able to deal with a variety of perspectives. All of that is to say that a school can define a civic purpose, I think, that’s not in tension with its educational purposes. Most schools in the United States ever since the 1700s have had a civic purpose as part of what they do.
I think it’s nonsense that some college presidents are saying, “Oh, we’re just for the pursuit of truth.” Colleges in America have always been about character and civics. We can embrace that, but we can’t do it in a parochial way. If we do it in a parochial way, we’re limiting the educational potential of our students to explore ideas that may not be currently fashionable in their generation or among the faculty.
Let’s zoom out from this a little bit because there’s a more fundamental question that we’ve wrestled with on this show, which is: What is college actually for? Is it just job preparation, a credentialing machine, or is it more?
I believe that college is for three things. The first is to discover what you love to do — what makes you feel alive when you’re working. It’s important for students to have the freedom to make that discovery because at a selective school, they say, Well, I got As in this subject, but they may not like doing that, or they’ve never tried engineering, astronomy, poetry. A place where they can discover the kinds of things that give them meaning when they do those things.
The second thing is to make the person who’s discovering what they love to do get much better at what they love to do. We can do a better job of that. Grade inflation drives me nuts, makes me feel like the old man that I am. I think we need to kick the student in the butt because a lot of the time they think they’re pretty good at something and maybe they’re pretty good, but they can get a lot better. I think it’s really important that every student works really hard. It’s so against the grain of the American consumer view of higher education, which is that it should be this time in your life where you get to have so much fun. You make your friends, you get married, have a lot of sex, and that’s fine. That’s discovering what you love to do in a way, but I think students should go to a school where there are people who are making you better at what you love to do.
The third thing is that you learn how to share what you’ve gotten better at and you love to do with other people. That usually means selling it. It means getting a job where you can continue to practice the things you love to do and that people will pay you for doing it.
People will say to me, Well, I discovered I love poetry, so I sit in the basement and write poems. No, no, no. I mean, you’ve got to get better at it and then you’ve got to be able to take it out into the marketplace, out into the world. If you have those three things — discovering what you love to do, getting much better at it, and learning to take it out into the world and finding a job where these things are aligned — that is a way that college can help people thrive long after they graduate.
Are you worried that AI is a threat to the model of education you just described?
It can be a tool for the model I just described. I mean, I use AI all the time when I’m trying to find out information about things or get various takes on an issue. I think it’s really helpful. I do worry that the joy that I’ve tried to describe of thinking for yourself in the company of others or discovering what you love to do and getting better at it — that you might not have that experience because you can outsource it to a bot.
Now, take athletes as a counterexample. If I say to somebody on the football team, Instead of hitting that guy or running laps, why don’t you just play Madden or something. Have a very good AI version of football, put your immersive thing on and you don’t have to play. I think they’ll look at me like I’m crazy because it’s an embodied practice.
It’s not just watching football. Now, I think that the hard question that you’re pointing to is, Do people want to think, or will they be happy if AI thinks for them? I believe they want to think if you invite them to think.