A week before Thanksgiving, Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, took to his Twitter account. A CNN film about student debt, called Ivory Tower, was about to air for the first time. Roth features heavily in it as a defender of higher education and liberal learning, and he seemed determined to have his say as the piece made its premiere. For two hours, he tweeted and retweeted about the film more than 40 times.
He acknowledged the problem of student debt as acute but kept emphasizing the centrality of liberal learning to the future of American higher education. He sees the liberal arts as necessary for citizenship and the future of this country. The next day, he discovered that his book, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, had made The Washington Post’s list of 50 2014 Notable Nonfiction Books.
Roth is an unusual president. Even while dealing with endowments, donors, alumni, recruitment, university planning, budgets, and so on, he’s used his lofty position to become a public intellectual. He seems to revel in the debates about the future of education, speaking especially sharply against what he sees as ill-considered technological fixes that, as he said to me in an interview, “aim at conformity over thinking.” Now he’s published a book that examined the history of debates on the nature of higher education, and found that, while the details vary, we’ve been arguing about much the same thing for centuries.
I am a Wesleyan alumnus, though I’ve mostly ignored my alma mater since graduating in 1995. I got a wonderful education there that has served me well, but alumni events always seemed to focus on the “other” Wesleyan—the Wesleyan of lawyers and corporate executives, people with money, people who didn’t seem to have any connections to my artsy and intellectual cohort. Once, Jed Hoyer, the general manager of the Chicago Cubs and a fellow Wesleyan history major, held an alumni event at Wrigley Field, so I went to that. Otherwise, I ignored the mailers, I donated no money, and I didn’t pay attention to administrative turnover at a university from which I felt distanced.
And then this past fall, I received a flyer for an alumni event called, “How to Destroy Higher Education,” featuring President Roth. I arranged an interview with him. I read his book. I went to the event. We exchanged some emails. Roth’s real goal is, of course, not destroying higher education but saving it, and convincing people that they should care about liberal learning.
I’ve written several columns about public engagement for The Chronicle, usually focusing on ways that faculty members might reach a larger audience, and how their institutions can help. In Michael Roth, to my surprise, I’ve found a president practicing what I’ve been preaching. He is applying his expertise as a historian and philosopher to major societal issues, through his book, his blog, social media, and via sites like The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and The Huffington Post.
In his writing, Roth seems to be trying to reshape the narrative of crisis and disruption in American higher education. He’s not complacent. He acknowledges the real challenges about equality of access to universities in this era of rising costs and income inequality. One of his arguments, though, is that such challenges are not completely new. Since the founding of our nation, educators and civic leaders have been debating about who should go to college, what they should learn, and who should pay for it. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was concerned about equality of access and opportunity. W.E.B. DuBois claimed that, ideally, everyone should receive a liberal education, even if that wasn’t practical for economic reasons. Roth seems to hope that, if we can agree on the type of education that’s best, then we can focus on developing the financial tools to make that education more accessible.
What Roth doesn’t want to see is education transform into training. At the end of his book, he writes about the pressure to directly link higher education to jobs: “These folks want a more routinized, efficient, and specialized education to train students for jobs. Yesterday’s jobs, I tend to think.” He’s attacked the disruptive “nano-degrees” proposed by technology titans like Sebastian Thrun, who wants high-school graduates to learn programming so they can quickly go out and get entry-level jobs.
Roth deploys the arguments of John Dewey against early 20th-century vocational training as a foil to Thrun’s plan. Roth notes that Dewey wrote, “The kind of vocational education in which I am interested is not one which will ‘adapt’ workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that.” Thrun’s company, Udacity, promises, “You’ll learn skills that match industry demands.” Roth is choosing Dewey’s path.
Roth’s arguments are not unique. Lots of people criticize technological faddism in higher education, worry about costs and access to universities, and defend liberal learning. What’s unusual here is that when he’s not writing about these issues, Roth has the power to actually effect change at one of America’s elite universities. So I asked him what he was doing to change Wesleyan.
Roth responded by invoking the words of Victor L. Butterfield, president at Wesleyan from 1943 to 1967: “If these are the best four years of your life, we’ve failed you.” Butterfield’s message holds true for Roth: The goal of education is to help people handle what comes next.
As a professor, Roth said he never cared if his students were happy (as president, he noted, part of his job is to care that students are happy), but whether students left his courses ready to apply what they had learned to new situations. University structure, he said, can help enable that result and figure out whether Wesleyan’s education model is working. For example, he would like to see Wesleyan graduates care less about their transcripts (unlikely, I think) and focus on producing a portfolio of work that shows what they can do with their education.
Roth, like many presidents, is trying to make his university accessible to a more diverse population. At the alumni event, “How to Destroy Higher Education,” he and his guests made the stakes of such efforts clear by telling story after story of social mobility enabled by admission to Wesleyan. He was not patting himself on the back, however, but using those anecdotes as a way to call for a “robust public dialogue” on access to education. Many institutions are trying to recruit and financially support students who might not otherwise think to apply to an elite institution, but they tend to pursue such efforts on their own.
Moreover, he joked, presidents of elite colleges typically lie to each other about how great everything is on their campuses. Instead, it’s time for an honest national discussion about the role of college in helping people achieve social mobility, a conversation based not in training for yesterday’s jobs, but in developing the habits of mind and skills required to thrive in whatever comes next. And if we are to have that discussion, perhaps we should try to escape the debates of the past as we confront the problems of the future.