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Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we're devoted to having conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, April 10th, and I'm Robyn Minter Smyers.

I'm a partner at Thompson Hine and a past president of the City Club Board of directors.

It's my distinct honor to introduce today's speaker, the 16th president of Wesleyan University, Michael S Roth.

Almost exactly two years ago today, I heard President Roth for the first time.

My husband, Bert, and I were accompanying our child, Lawrence, then a Shaker Heights High School senior, on a visit to Wesleyan University on admitted Students Day.

President Roth told the prospective students and their parents that they should expect to encounter student protests while visiting the campus, and shared that the best way of embracing free speech and fostering open inquiry and constructive dialog is what they should expect on campus.

He argued for the importance of a college environment where students are challenged, not shielded, and where intellectual risk taking is essential to learning.

President Roth's message that day really resonated with us, and I'm proud to say I'm now the mother of a Wesleyan sophomore.

President Roth's words feel even more relevant today, than they did two years ago.

Perhaps at no time in American history has it been harder to be a college president.

Colleges and universities aren't just facing demographic and financial pressures, but also intense political scrutiny, threats and fines over whom they admit, what they teach and how they operate.

President Roth has emerged as one of the country's leading voices on these issues.

A steadfast defender of academic freedom, open inquiry and the essential role that universities play in a democratic society.

His seventh book, Safe Enough Spaces A pragmatists Approach to Inclusion, Free speech and Political Correctness on College Campuses, released in 2021, explores how campuses can balance inclusion and free expression.

In his recent writings, he's warned us about the dangers of state intrusion into academic life, arguing that freedom of thought is foundational to a free society.

Today, President Roth will share his perspective on the state of higher education and the role universities must play in a time of uncertainty and change.

Moderating the conversation is Doctor Nigamanth Sridhar provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Cleveland State University and a member of the City Club board of directors.

Before we begin, a quick reminder for our live stream and radio audience.

If you have a question during the Q&A portion of the forum, you can text 330-541-5794 and the City club staff will try to work it into the program.

Now members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming President Michael S Roth and Doctor Nigamanth Sridhar President Roth Welcome to Cleveland.

Welcome to the City club.

Thank you very much for this.

I am looking forward to this conversation.

Where and when Dan called and said, would you sit in moderate?

I'm like, wait, you want me?

But, you know, I'm here, so you got it.

Well, welcome.

You know, when we think about, the title of today's forum, rising to the defense of higher education, two terms come to mind, and I think we should begin, our conversation with the distinguishing these two terms.

And that's free speech that's codified in the first in the, in the, in the First Amendment and the, and the notion of academic freedom, which is core to how universities are structured.

Unfortunately, these terms are used interchangeably both in and outside of academia.

I think it's useful to spend just a couple of minutes situating ourselves in what the distinctions are and why it's important to keep those distinctions in mind.

So would you speak to that first?

Sure.

People have, a right to free speech when they're in the United States, and that includes citizens and other people who live in the country.

And that includes, the freedom to say dumb and offensive things, as well as, the freedom to say wise and perceptive things.

And, and you'll all judge where we come out on that, on that continuum.

In the next, our academic freedom is a legal, concept that defines the professional, rights and responsibilities of people who work and, education and I'm not a lawyer.

There is a there is a great book on academic freedom, just so happens to be written by a Wesleyan alumnus named David Raven.

I don't get any cut on the royalties, but, published by Harvard University Press a couple of years ago.

History of academic freedom.

And what ribbon shows is basically over the years since around the time of the First World War.

The courts have recognized that for, professors and teachers, researchers, to do their jobs.

Well, they should have the professional latitude to inquire as they see fit and to express the results of their inquiry, the work they've done as they see fit.

So you don't want, I don't know.

Let's say your pediatrician before, she gives the diagnosis about your kids, cough to have to pass through, a language test imposed by the government.

Or by, public opinion, even, you want them to have that professional freedom to describe the world as they are equipped to do and to learn and to engage in inquiry as they're equipped to do.

And so, academic freedom has for many years defined the, educators rights to, pursue their professional teaching and inquiry.

According to the discipline therein and according to how they understand it.

As professionals.

It's pretty straightforward, except except when a historian says and another thing the busses in Cleveland should not allow in the system, you know, crazy.

You know, and and then you say, how do you how do you universally employ such a historian who doesn't know anything about busses or whatever it is?

You know, who says some outrageous thing and, and then says, well, it's my academic freedom to opine on transportation.

Even though I am a historian of ancient Greece, I am opining on, transportation or on American politics or on what's happening in the Middle East.

And so there it does get murky for, professors and and for presidents and deans, how, how much stupidity should you allow a person to express if you're just as an American?

As much as you can write, you can say, I don't know anything.

You want free speech?

Up to seven points of inciting violence and all.

But as do I have to have someone on my faculty who speaks that way, and and there I think there is often there's often a gray zone.

Most of the time, it's pretty clear if you're teaching kids how to read, you make professional judgments about how to teach and what to read.

If you're teaching people American history, you make professional judgments as a historian about how to teach, what to read and how to do research.

But when you step out of your academic role and say something about X, whatever the controversy is, then you're testing the boundaries of academic freedom.

Most professors, no surprise.

The boundaries are really what they say.

We should be able to say whatever we want.

If you ask the American Association of University Professors, their boundaries are very wide.

And they often like me because I also think the boundaries should be very wide, but I don't think they should be.

They should be no boundaries.

I, I think that there are some things that teachers say outside the classroom that make it impossible to be their students.

If you belong to certain groups.

So if a professor says something, I don't know, viciously racist or anti-Semitic, or whatever it is, and then goes and teaches classes where they're supposed to have people in their classroom, a front that would be affected by those groups.

That's a real problem for the university.

These tend to be edge cases.

They get a lot of attention, but they tend to be few and far between.

Thank you.

We're certainly familiar with edge cases.

And, so, so let's, you know, so let's sort of transition into talking about the government a little bit.

Yes.

You know, you've, you've written and said a lot about the role of the government in, in the, in this in the area of higher education and education in general.

And actually more specifically government intrusion in the business of higher education.

Can you comment on, you know, what, what level of involvement there should be?

From the government and what what you've said in, in terms of like, why is why do you see this as intrusion?

Yeah.

Well, so, you know, when a college president is supposed to say university president supposed to say the government's involvement should be to give me money and then to leave, that's what that's what we kind of that's the attitude we seem to have had over the last 50 years.

I want to do research on X. I want to do research on Y, I need some government support.

Give me the money.

And then the government says, well, how about doing this my way or doing this in a different way.

So that's intrusion.

So that's that's a weak side of being the of my world being university president.

United States, has a higher education sector that has thrived for, a long time, especially since the Second World War, because the federal government and in many states, state government has seen fit to provide enormous financial support for research and and to some extent for access.

The access part is more complicated because the government support often came in the form of loan guarantees, which is one of those careful what you wish for things when you have a an epidemic of indebtedness.

In many other countries, government support was to give people scholarships, not to give them loans.

Or the government in the United States often propped up lenders rather than students.

But when we talk about mostly these days with government, role in universities is the extraordinary support for research and in some cases for programs that did work outside of the university.

So very early in the current administration, Johns Hopkins University saw hundreds of millions of dollars disappear that were going through USAID programs, and, various parts of the world that depended on those programs for, let's say, medicine or other forms of health care.

Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people have already died because those funds have been taken away, they say, from Hopkins.

But it's not really Hopkins.

Hopkins used those funds to do the work it was going to do.

Researchers, at your university use those funds to, study biology or to to, to, study computer science or to advance, work in and chemistry and material science, though that support has allowed universities in the United States to be at the forefront of discovery.

And and second to none.

I mean, are you now, you see that China has actually advanced greatly.

Many of its universities have more citations, than the citations that some universities in the United States.

But for the last, 60 years or so, that government support has served the country so well because of the research that is produced in the last year, that research money was used as a kind of ransom, to force universities, to take different steps ideologically.

And this is an innovation of the current administration.

There had been threats before.

Other administrations have threatened to do things to government if you don't do things.

Our way of President Obama and and President Biden certainly did that, but no funds were cut.

They were threats, for sure.

The current administration realize you're more effective if you actually just start cutti and the cutting of budgets, let's say, at, at the schools and especially in the northeast, but also elsewhere in the country, the budgets that were being cut most dramatically were the budgets of scientists doing research that would advance the public good.

The ecosystem of knowledge, advances the public good.

But they were being cut because the current administration, really is concerned about anti-white prejudice.

And the current administration, says I don't believe them is very concerned about anti-Semitism.

So you have this paradoxical effect that Jewish scientists doing research on Alzheimer's or on genetic based cancers that affect not only Jews, but Jews and others, their budgets are being destroyed in the name of protecting the campus from anti-Semitism.

It is.

It's so absurd, that it's staggering and and it's and it's negative effects.

The negative effects are, first order are on the scientists themselves and the work they're doing.

And the drug trials that just got canceled.

And the second order effects is that people are afraid at the universities to say what I just said.

There I was, I was at Harvard ten days ago, and there's oh, you're so brave to say these things.

I said, you guys all know you.

I'm not saying anything.

That's you don't agree with.

Hey.

Yeah, but we don't say that out loud.

And it's, it's to me, it's shocking.

I grew up in, my father was a, a furrier.

He made, fur coats, and he took those fur coats and, you know, goosed them up so he could sell them into profit.

And, and he always told me when I was a kid, you know, you live in a free country.

I mean, I, I was a such, like a naive, privileged white kid growing up in Long Island.

Long Island.

He said if a my parents were always very suspicious of the police.

It's a long story, but, and, you know, but he say if the police ever bother you, you ask for their badge numbers.

I was eight years old, sitting there with my buddies.

We just play basketball, drinking, like root beer, eating a Twinkie, and the police come a because that's what they did in my little town.

They said, come on, guys, move along.

And it's like, what's your badge number?

And it didn't surprise me that they said, can you read?

It's rude to instead of hitting me, you know, and I grew up in that atmosphere was like, yeah, and this is a free country.

And, and so, and my friend's parents were there, my parents were cops, and they were and they worked for the town and and but we had the sense that you could say the things you wanted to say and you would discover that's how you discover you're wrong.

Actually, when you when you speak up and then someone can speak back to you and say, no, no, no, no.

And then you, that's how you learn.

And so government intrusion, go back to your question.

Sorry.

Government intrusion is now dampening free speech on campus in the name of free speech.

That's what's so strange about it.

I've had presidents say to me, we have such great free speech at our campus.

There have been no demonstrations this year.

Because they think, oh, the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, they squash speech.

They didn't squash speech.

They were loud.

And when people are loud and you want to you want to get heard, you do what I'm doing.

You yell you you louder.

But most importantly, what you can do is try to take it down a notch so you can listen to each other.

But right now, at colleges, universities across the country, there is this fear of speaking out because the government, might not like what you say.

And I've been teaching since 1983.

I've never had seen that feeling before.

Oh, I was I was going to follow up, but then you just answered my question of why do you find it so important?

But thank you for being so eloquent and talking about why it is important for for a person in your position to speak the way that you do.

I want to, you know, follow up, a little and you touched on this, so a number of universities, have taken what's referred to as a neutrality position.

Yes.

You speak a little bit about that and what your thoughts on that are.

But I don't want to have there are presidents here and they may have a neutrality position.

So I'm sorry if I say the wrong.

And so from offensive I the neutrality principle.

Let me tell you, there were nine schools in the country, before October 8th, the day after October 7th.

Right.

23.

Right.

That that had a neutrality principle.

Most of them didn't.

Even those nine schools, they didn't abide by it.

Bob Zimmer at the University of Chicago, he would mouth off at the various things.

And, and nobody cared because it came about in 1967.

Calvin the professor, Calvin Harris, Chicago, they were frightened to say no.

But if you said you were pro war in Vietnam, you get in trouble.

You see your auntie where you get in trouble.

So what do you do?

You come up with a principle.

Is it keep your mouth shut.

Principle.

And they said, oh, if you keep your mouth shut, other people can speak.

That's that's the that's the academic twist.

If the president doesn't talk, other people will feel more free to talk.

This is very unusual idea from defenders of free speech, who for decades have said the cure for bad speech is more speech, not neutrality, more speech, but the Calvin principle, so-called Calvin principle.

In 1967, made this other move, because it was a no win situation for people like me.

You know, if you were against the war, you got yelled at.

If you're for the war, it gets so that they come up with the principle after October 7th.

Similar thing.

Suddenly now there are 140 schools that have embraced some form of neutrality or the very white you, the white the kind of.

And you know that the restraint Princeton, you know, have a pretty strange policy.

It's very it's very, it's very civilized.

I think it's I think it's it's not a policy.

It's just like, I don't want to speak up because I'm going to get in trouble.

And let me say that encourages speech.

Now, I realize that I know the arguments.

The people say, well, if you have to speak out on everything, nobody has to speak out and everything, and no one ever has.

Asking a university at Harvard not only the president and the provost, but the chairs of departments, the heads of centers, they're not supposed to speak on anything that's controversial.

Now, again, I don't think there should be a policy saying they should speak out.

I think it should be up to them.

They're thoughtful people.

They're not just a bunch of bureaucrats.

You would hope signing things.

They they might actually offer guidance, and they would have the opportunity to have their views corrected.

If they spoke out and they found out they were wrong about something.

And so nine schools, I think 7 or 9 schools before October 7th now know scores over 100.

It's they didn't discover something about free speech.

They discovered that if they said something pro-Israel, some of their students would be very upset at them if they said something pro-Palestinian.

Some of their students and other constituents would be very upset at them.

And so there is a policy says just, just don't say anything.

And it seems to me it's it's, making a virtue of cowardice.

It's making, it's depriving the public sphere of the contributions of what we hope are thoughtful people, people who are leading colleges and universities.

Not that they know everything, but that they might know something and add it to the mix.

But, I am I think I'm in a minority position on this, my state, you know, because because I though I don't have a policy.

I would say the policy at Wesleyan is that the the president shouldn't say stupid crap.

That's our policy.

And I've, I've broken that several times, according to my trustees, but, but but we don't you don't need a policy for that.

And so the neutrality I guess the short answer is what is the problem to which that that principle is a solution?

It's the problem is that you don't you might get in trouble.

Well, well, I'm glad you you are out there doing what you're doing because.

Because it's.

You don't have to.

Well, well, well it's not not just that.

Right.

But you know, when we think about, we think about the campus contexts that many of us operate in.

Some campus contexts allow us to do that and some others don't.

And that's the and that's the recognition that's there.

I agree with that.

Yeah.

I mean, there are some campuses you don't want to speak out, but it's not because there's a neutrality principle just because it's a very complicated situation.

You don't want to annoy people, right?

That would be an interesting policy.

The I don't want to annoy them.

Too many people pass.

So.

Well, speaking of campus contexts, you know, and and when you think about government intrusion, we're in the state of Ohio.

I work at a public university in Ohio.

You know, when we were chatting a few days ago, we talked about Ohio's Senate Bill one.

You know, which is which is the the piece of legislation that was enacted last year that is that it can be described as probably the most sweeping change in the way that the state views public universities and how public universities are run.

So, you know, have you had a chance to think about, oh, yeah, thanks to you, I had a chance to to look at the bill and and see some of the conversations about it.

It's a funny thing.

I mean, there are some things in the bill that I like.

I don't like the fact the government makes you do it.

You know, that's, and so, the, for example, the civics side of things, I think, colleges or universities should offer something like civics classes we are offering.

You know, we only have 3000 students at Wesleyan, 30, 200 students.

But we have, many more high school kids online taking four credit college credit courses.

And we've introduced a civics course, that we're giving all over the country in title one high schools.

And I think, schools should every school should do that, but I don't.

But this is a kind of Wesleyan thing, which is we don't like requirements at Wesleyan, so I don't think you should you should force people to do it, but I think people should want to do it.

You know, like eating the right food or something.

I don't think that somebody should always tell you what to eat, but you should be encouraged in the right direction.

So there are things in the bill like teaching civics, which I think, are good things to encourage.

And there are ways to do that without, having state legislators, I tell you what, should be in a class or tell you how to teach your class.

That seems to me, nothing against your particular state legislators, but it does seem that they don't know enough to do that.

And, and and I don't know enough to do that.

I mean, I think there could be dozens of ways of teaching civics that would be better than not teaching.

Of course, in that area where the where the intrusion seems much more problematic is when they are trying to, eliminate what is come to be called die without really defining it.

I mean, that's clearly their intention is to not define it so that people are afraid of almost everything they might do.

That would have a positive effect on groups that have been discriminated against historically.

And so keeping with the current administration's concern about anti-white racism, which is their dominant concern, SB one says that you you can't actually have any programs that might benefit in particular, protected classes of people.

And, that's how they define Dei, so that what that means is, if you, find yourself, not getting many applicants from, a part of the state, that with a large black population, if you start recruiting more in that area and get more applicants, black applicants from that area, you are in violation of SB one.

As I understand it.

Again, I'm not a lawyer, but just reading, reading, the bill and some of the commentaries on it and the same thing would be true of women.

It won't be true for athletes.

So don't worry, they're not a protected class.

So if you want to recruit athletes, if rich people, rich people are not a protected class.

So I can my job is I have to find very wealthy people who want to come to Wesleyan and give us money.

Don't tell anyone I've said that.

But they're not a protected class.

So that's not prohibited.

What is prohibited?

What is prohibited in the bill is paying attention to history.

When you make decisions about programs.

So teaching programs that say, deal with the history of sexism or racism or recruiting faculty or staff from, groups that have been underrepresented historically.

Now, the reason there is a good argument for that, I think, which is that, hey, Joe didn't keep those people from getting jobs.

Joe deserves as much a chance as anybody else just because he's white.

He shouldn't be held responsible for the racist, and his white racist ancestors or or people who share his race.

It's not fair to Joe that I that's I think that's actually not a bad argument for Joe, but for the ecosystem of the school to not be able to create a more diverse environment where everyone feels included, not because they share the same race or the same ideas, or the same, gender.

If everyone feels included through their differences.

That's a really educational environment.

When you when you are hamstrung by the state to not do those things in the name of getting rid of something called the DUI, in the name of protecting white people is really what it is.

I think that's a big mistake.

And I think colleges and universities should be allowed to determine how they can recruit, fairly and responsibly, faculty, staff and students and SB1 seems to undermine that, freedom.

So as a, as, as somebody that's had a front seat, actually the driver's seat role in implementing the provisions of SB one, our our principal, at Cleveland State has been to say, well, the notion is, is if you're talking about diversity, diversity has to be in the intellectual field.

And that means that no idea is is taboo.

There should be, the opportunity for faculty and students to be able to argue about every single topic that comes up.

And that's that's been the sort of the guiding principle that we've used as an organizing principle that, you know, as I see President Bloomberg is here as well.

Our approach is let's keep that as the, as the, as the, as a North Star and then organize around it.

Yeah.

And I think that's that's very wise.

I do think life experience, diverse life experiences also helps people learn when you're sitting in a classroom with people who from different parts of the state, different backgrounds, I mean, just you, you learn.

I think you learn more.

And our country has become so segregated by education, by class, by profession, that college and university is a time when you actually will meet people who might be quite different from you.

I do think the focus on intellectual diversity is a very interesting thing.

I have been calling for more intellectual diversity on colleges and universities since 2016.

I wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal calling for an affirmative action program for conservatives in 2016, and no one liked this piece.

But like I said, the Wall Street Journal.

I read the Wall Street Journal because people people are so angry, you know, and the idea that a college president could write something that would anger so many people at the same time, and keep his job, it was it was astonishing.

And I said that because it's very clear to me that colleges, universities have incredible political biases, especially in the humanities and social sciences, and that you have faculty who say, I don't choose people just because their politics are congenial to me.

I choose them because they are the best.

And that's exactly what white people said about why they only hire white people, just white men said why they only hire men.

And so what the people always say.

But I think when you look at the, the, the affiliation, political affiliations of the faculty, when you look at the courses they teach, when you look at their syllabi, it's very clear that there's an intense bias towards the left side of the political spectrum in American colleges and universities.

And it's gotten much worse over the last 30 years.

I mean, the statistics are very clear.

I think the current administration has made it harder for me to talk about that, actually, because they want to impose it by the government.

And that seems to me worse than, the then the professional prejudices of the faculty.

But I think it's incumbent upon those of us who are in colleges, universities to fight the prejudice, the bias towards people whose politics are congenial to us in the university, because what happens in such a situation is not only do you fail to encounter conservative ideas, and that's a big problem.

Religious ideas, it's a big problem in certain fields.

But what what what what also happens is that, when folks are in the room and they all seem to think the same thing, they actually get more extreme.

All the studies in social psychology show this, that when you get a group of like minded people together and they and they, they, they, they talk about an issue, they get more extreme about that issue.

When you have an assembly with people with very disparate views, they actually moderate as they get to know each other.

They say, well, I guess you're not a bad person.

You have that view.

I must, you know, they moderate.

And so what happens in colleges, universities, in some departments is that they, they you know, they say, well that's a racist thing.

You say, oh you think that's racist?

Well that's racist to.

Oh yeah.

Well this bell is responsible for the genocide.

You know you get goes.

It just goes beyond crazy because you start because you I have to go further than you went and you have to and and and many colleges and universities, there are departments, that have encouraged not just political extremism, but intellectual aridity, a desert of ideas, because they're not they're not encountering, a counterweight to their own prejudices.

And I do think part of academic freedom is to actually work on that internally.

But for the government to come in and say, well, you shouldn't teach Machiavelli, because what he's a I'm not crazy conservative liberal, I teach Aristotle.

What are they going to do with that?

But I also teach Aquinas, you know, and I don't think the only person teaching, a medieval Catholic theologian should be a Jew from Long Island.

I think we should also have some Catholic teaching that, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to teach.

It doesn't mean I can't teach it.

But if you only had white people teaching black studies or men teaching women's studies, there's something clearly, suboptimal about that.

So we have to clean up our own house.

Yeah.

So I want to transition to a question and answer in a couple of minutes here, but, but I want to end on a high note, and you speak a little bit about your work, at Wesleyan, specifically about democracy, summer and democracy.

250 yeah.

So democracy, 250 is a program we've been talking about.

I was inspired by freedom Summer, of nicest 1964, when colleges and universities, had many of their students head to Mississippi to register voters.

It was extremely dangerous.

People were murdered.

A, Wesleyan alum wrote a little, a memoir about this where he was arrested five times.

And it was it was a brutal thing.

And I thought they were there to protect democracy.

They were there.

And so we should do a democracy summer, what I didn't know at the time was that Jamie Raskin has been doing a democracy summer for many years.

It's not nonpartisan.

Ours is nonpartisan.

So whether it's and ours is focused on the summer right now, but it's going to go on for throughout this calendar year and beyond, trying to defend democracy by getting more students to participate in it.

Now, I was just talking to the leaders of your community college here in Cleveland.

They've been doing this work for so long, so much more deeply than I am doing it.

And they have reached thousands and thousands of students getting them to learn how to vote, to acquire the habit, to vote, to, to to find joy and participation in democracy.

And that's what we're trying to do.

It's the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence, a declaration that we want to be free, that we aspire to live in a polity where we're equal as citizens.

You don't have to tell me this.

We fell short.

I know, of course, but what an aspiration, what an aspiration, and what pains me is when I see 20 year olds who are already jaded about this, already cynical about this, who are.

And what excites me is when young people get involved in campaigns, when they work for a candidate, because then they go knocking on doors and they're not going to just hear the same thing they hear in their dorm.

They're going to hear other points of view.

They're going to say, oh, I really want you to support this candidate because he agrees with me about Palestine.

And the person is going to say, yeah, what are you going to do about my interest payments?

What are you going to do about the cost?

And they're going to have to say, oh, that's your kid.

And that's a great thing.

That's a great thing.

And so we have been contacting hundreds and hundreds of colleges, universities around the country to collect, best practices or let me just say, good enough practices to get students to get out there and participate in this democracy.

There's a non-trivial chance that the elections in the fall won't be free and fair.

I mean, I think that's a I just a very modest way of stating it.

And there's a and and and that should that should show a heck out of us that should really give us like what in this country.

So how do you stop that?

You get people who care.

And if we don't have if people don't care when they're 20, they're not going to care when they're like, I just turned 69 this week, they're not going to care.

And they're like, me.

So our job and and you're in community colleges has been doing it for years.

Our job is to get people to care about this country and participate in how it's governed.

While they can feel happy about their.

So what about to begin?

What about to begin the audience Q&A?

For those just tuning in, we are live stream or our radio audience.

I am Nigamanth Sridhar I serve as executive Vice president and Provost of Cleveland State University, a proud member of the board of directors and moderator for today's conversation.

Joining me on stage is Michael Roth, the 16th president of Wesleyan University.

We're discussing the future of higher education and the defense of academic freedom and freedom and free speech on college campuses.

We welcome questions from everyone city Club members, guests and those joining via our live stream at Cityclub.org or live radio broadcast at 89.7 WKSU Ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to text a question, please text it to (330)541-5794.

That's (330)541-5794, and city club staff will try to work it into the program.

May we have our first question, please.

Yes, thank you very much, sir.

I agree with what you're saying.

For me, a qualification of a great professor would be one that would engage, inspire a student to have a knock down, drag out, but respectful dialog with him in the classroom that afterwards not be threatened about it.

He'll take a swig of water and say, gee, that was great.

Would you agree with that?

I would, I would, I do think that, it's a very important feature for, great teachers to be able not just to tolerate disagreement, but to create disagreement in the classroom.

So when I teach, my students really don't know where I stand on the issues that we're talking about.

They just know that I'm going to contradict them wherever they stand, or I'll find another student to contradict them, because the issue is what we want people to do is to learn how to think for themselves in the company of others.

I wrote this little book called The Student A Short History and my is my conclusion.

After looking at different ways of learning, over in the West over a long period of time, was that in the modern era, that's what we want from our young folks when they're in school.

We want them to learn to think for themselves, in the company of others and and to stand on their own feet.

And so I don't really want someone who's always going to be oppositional.

That's a that's a mode that can get pretty tiresome.

So one of the things I do in addition to debate that I really think is important for students, is for them to learn how to appreciate something they didn't expect to appreciate, whether it's Aristotle or Aquinas or whether it's a a movie or a work of art, or a different another culture.

I think it's many of our students, especially at good universities.

They're very they're very they get trained to be critical, very good critical thinkers.

I want them to have that.

But I also want them to be open hearted, to say, I know why you like this.

I didn't think I'd like that.

Now I see you love this so much.

I should figure out why you love this so much.

That is a great skill because it actually it makes your world bigger.

Critique can make your world narrower.

I mean, more specialized, but just opening your heart to the world, not abandoning your critical faculties, but opening your heart and mind to what other people find important, and how they make judgments.

I think it makes you a better neighbor, and it makes you a better citizen, and it makes it's more fun.

I think.

Hi there.

I'm going to read one of our text questions that we've received.

How do you how does your community decide who is invited to speak, and how do you handle individuals whose speech is cited by certain groups as causing harm?

Thank you very much.

That.

Oh my goodness, we've had this.

So, I, I'm trying to think which story would be most, pertinent many years ago now.

A faculty committee recommended that I invite Justice Scalia to Wesleyan to talk in our free speech annual lecture.

And I thought this faculty group, which was much to the left compared to me, I thought they were testing me to see if I would listen to them.

So I thought, okay, I'll invite Justice Scalia.

He's not going to come anyway.

He's very busy.

Supreme Court justice I wrote to him, it seemed like by the time the letter arrived, I got the response ready.

I'd love to come spend the day at Western.

I was like, oh, hey, what am I going to do with this guy?

You know that?

The protesters were everywhere.

Everywhere.

And I myself thought he had done more harm to the interpretation of the American Constitution than anyone since the 1800s.

I could be wrong.

I'm not.

You know, as I said, I'm not a lawyer, and he's a smart guy.

And so he came the protocol for this lecture was that I introduce him to.

So, so I met did and my introduction was to, cite Leonard Levy, a great historian of the founding who disagreed with Scalia entirely.

And the only person who knew what I was doing was Justice Scalia.

He he gave he gave a nice talk.

It was a place was packed.

There were protests.

They were outside.

And, and if anyone stood up in the event we asked them to sit down or leave, they did.

And it was I thought it was a great event.

He made his arguments.

He got great pushback from the students, which he enjoyed.

I mean, he spent the day talking to students.

You didn't have to do that.

And, and so I thought it was a great event when I had protesters around a Black Lives Matter issue.

And I made a plea for free speech on campus.

Jelani Cobb, who's now the dean of Columbia's journalism school, had written a piece in The New Yorker, said free speech talk is often a cover for racism.

I just did free speech talk.

So I wrote him a note and said, do you want to come to Wesleyan and make that argument?

He was like, all right, sure.

So he came.

We had dinner and he went.

And it was a very tumultuous time on campus, a lot of protests.

So the room was packed with activists.

And Jelani, because of is a big guy, big voice and brilliant.

And he gets up there.

So I just had, dinner with your president and it was talking to him.

And you see all the actors you had dinner with, the fascist prof.

You know, and, and then he did his thing and he explained his view, which is different from mine.

And he explained to that's why he invited me because we don't agree.

And that's why I enjoyed the dinner, because we had a good conversation.

And so what we did, instead of just describing how we invite people or don't we modeled the conversation.

I would not invite a Nazi just to show I like free speech.

But I and I do.

I have said to students, when they say I need to be harmed by that lecture, I say, don't go.

I don't think you would be harmed, but don't go if you think you'll be harmed.

But you can't cancel something because you, won the trophy of cancellation.

They said I got them to stop.

And, speech rarely harms.

It does harm sometimes.

I do think that does harm.

So there are limits, I think, to free speech.

But they are not the safety of the students.

Students have and no one else.

We don't have a right not to be offended.

And, and, I think the sooner the learn that, the more resilience they have.

And of course, you have to do it differently.

Different groups have different experiences of these things.

But I have found and I teach courses that deal with rape, that deal with racism, to deal with, anti-Semitism.

I have found that the students may at first feel this is going to be ultra, ultra challenging for them emotionally, and then they get over it.

At 20, they can be stronger than they believe themselves to be.

And part of our job as teachers, just to really show them they can be stronger than they thought they could be.

welcome to the Western Reserve.

Thank you.

And my question is, do you think the, the actions of the administration and the, turmoil is causing is affecting undergraduate students?

Oh, yeah.

And and in different ways.

I think that, first of all, international students in the United States, which, you know, have there are many and there are fewer than there used to be a class, because I think it's a great thing about our country that we attract really bright people from around the world who want to learn here.

I mean, I came here to be an international student.

Well, round of applause.

And and so international students are very afraid, to speak out on campus, in many cases.

And, and, and it's harder to get a visa and it's harder to get both to get here and then to get the work visa so that that's a direct hit.

It's affected the climate of conversation on campuses, in ways that I actually am surprised about.

The, what?

I'm not surprised that people find the current administration's policies, disruptive, but I but I, I find that the response from students has been muted by fear.

The response of professors has been muted by fear, and even more so, presidents and chancellors and so, that affects undergraduates.

I think the, the current budget proposals that just went to Congress yesterday, I think, or this this week, certainly call for dramatic cuts to research.

And that will eventually affect undergraduates as well.

And so, I try to, you know, remember that for, for someone hearing about this, I said, well, the government is giving you guys that is your higher ed so much money for so long.

How long did you expect it to last?

And I the response, I think has to be, they gave this money in a competitive bidding process to scientists mostly know the funding for the arts and humanities.

Very small who who competed to show that they can do the best research possible.

And is that research goes away, goes to Canada, goes to France, goes to Germany, goes to China.

Opportunities for undergraduate learning will also be diminished.

And most importantly, scientific discoveries, they can benefit people in this country and around the world will happen less frequently.

My name is Roger Natarajan.

I'm the actuarial program director at the University of Michigan.

What am I doing here in Cleveland?

Pardon my attire I'm here on a music festival.

And somebody told me 15 minutes ago, or just 15 minutes before the start of the program, that is going to be a discussion about the independence of higher education.

And also our friend Nigamanth that is going to moder and I said, I got to attend this one.

Welcome.

So the question is how to handle the government intrusion.

My, thought was, I'm sure all the presidents of various universities, the neutral universities, at least to put their efforts together and give a response as opposed to individually handling this very tough issue.

You know, the government is counting on us divide and conquer strategy.

So I wonder if there is an effort of all the presidents, from Harvard to Wesleyan to Michigan to Cleveland State to, respond collectively.

Thank you, thank you.

It's a it's a great question.

And, I have been involved in trying to generate collective responses, since the very beginning.

Of the current administration and, how do I say this?

There's been, not that much enthusiasm.

There was a statement issued by the American Association of Colleges and Universities and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In, about a year ago, I guess, and, and I worked on that with the leaders from those organizations.

And at some point, people were willing to sign on.

But I have asked many times for specific collective action around and, the arrest of a student or about a specific policy.

And, the dominant mood has been, as one of my colleagues expressed it, I don't want to be the tallest blade of grass.

And, I, I found that extraordinary because that just meant that.

I hope your head gets cut off because it acknowledges that the lawnmowers out there and, the lack of solidarity is, is bad.

The lack of shame at not standing up is, I think, even worse.

People have said to me, it's easy for you, Michael Roth, to speak up against this because you don't have that much federal money at stake.

You know, we have, we're a small school.

We don't have a hospital.

You know, we don't have hundreds of millions of dollars of federal grants.

And I reflect on this is this is like saying to a to a rich person, you're so vulnerable because you have so much money, you have so much to lose.

And, you know, I don't I, I do think that people in universities that have hospitals are extremely vulnerable to government pressure, and patients will suffer very quickly if there's no money.

Schools with large endowments.

I can't think of a one that have announced that they've changed the payout rate from the endowment to make up for this, as the MacArthur Foundation did early on.

And other foundations have joined the MacArthur Foundation.

I can't think of a one, which is kind of shocking, MacArthur said.

Listen, we know it's not sustainable, but we made a lot more money in the last 15 years, each year for our endowment than we expected.

So for the next three years, we're going to spend more than we we should because it's an emergency.

Now.

In the long run, the research universities cannot exist without government support in the way they've existed before.

But in the short run, I think they could do more individually, and collectively.

But collectively, I think many of, my, my experience has been that there's not that much appetite for confrontation, collective confrontation.

So it's been said that you're the most courageous college president in the United States, including by me.

And I'm wondering, were you just born this way, or do you have support that enables you to be more courageous?

I want to thank my lovely wife, Carrie, while.

Oh, no, actually, I'm not courageous at all.

I am like this scared as a person.

I'm afraid of everything or no.

And so it's bizarre to me.

Thank you for saying that.

But, and I got this award, a courage award.

And a friend of mine who's a poet said somebody wanted to give me a courage award.

I duck and and I, and I. Yeah, this guy, that's why he's a poet.

That's a that's exactly right.

I mean, I get very I'm very I'm nervous now.

You know, when people like, when you say things like that, I'm just.

I'm like, what?

What's your what's your badge number?

Well, I mean, that's what I'm doing.

I'm just asking for the things we have a right to ask for.

I'm, I, I'm very careful to obey the law.

My students sometimes say, why don't we engage in civil disobedience?

You guys could do that.

That's not what I do.

As president, we used to have a program called Girls and Science to try a little kids, little girls to be in our science program, to be in science programs because they're underrepresented.

It, and we had our students and women faculty go and talk with elementary school girls about physics and things.

We're not allowed to do that.

Civil rights complaint, discrimination against boys.

I change the title.

I wanted to make it mostly in parentheses.

Girls and science.

But my general counsel thought that would be silly.

Too courageous, too stupid.

And so it's just called Kids in Science, because that's the law, that elections have consequences.

The current administration has a right to define title six and title nine as they see fit.

They don't have a right to be lawless.

And when they're breaking their own rules or not having any rules at all, I think as a citizen we should call it out.

But I am not courageous.

I am very nervous when people ask me about do I have a good lawyer?

Makes me very nervous, I do, I hope.

Thank you, president Michael Roth Thank you doctor Nigamanth Sridhar for joining us today at the City Club.

Forums like this are made possible thanks to the generous support from individuals like you.

You can learn more about how to become a guardian of free speech at CityClub.org The City Club would like to welcome guests at tables hosted by the College, now Greater Cleveland and Cuyahoga Community College.

Thank you all for being here.

Thank you once again to President Roth and Doctor Sridhar and to our members and friends of the City Club.

I'm Robyn Minter Smyers and this forum is now adjourned.

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