12 minute read
INTERVIEW: MICHAEL ROTH
from Issue 3
TZAR TARAPORVALA
& NICK ERICHSON
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INTERVIEW:
MICHAEL ROTH
The following is the transcript of an interview by Tzar Taraporvala and Nick Erichson with Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University. Roth’s interests center on how people make sense of the past, and his research explores intellectual and cultural history, as well as philosophy and psychology. This conversation, which focuses on Roth’s new book, Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech and Political Correctness on College Campuses, aims to foster a broader discussion about Roth’s understanding of safe spaces and the climate on college campuses. The interview has been transcribed and edited for brevity and clarity by Taraporvala and Erichson.
GADFLY: Safe spaces, or “safe enough spaces,” seem to rely on the idea that there is a boundary or threshold of harm or distress that is acceptable, and one that is not. Pragmatically, at the university level, who do you see as the individual that adjudicates this and determines where the boundaries lie?
INTERVIEW ROTH: My position is that there isn’t a clear defnition of the boundary: it is in diferent places for diferent people, and there is no algorithm that will get you to a rational defnition or picture of the threshold. I think that in many places it will be the teacher. We can easily think of examples where the teacher becomes the problem, and then the student becomes the authority. But most of the time it will be the teacher’s responsibility to convince the students that they should speak openly about the things that matter most to them, even though [the students] might encounter the reaction that they are wrong. Ten there are times when the teacher becomes the problem. Let’s take a morally neutral example: the professor is really ill and doesn’t teach the class. Well, the students then have to go fnd someone else to get relief. Tis is very unusual, but nonetheless a high impact example. You can think of morally charged examples where the professor does something wrong. Who adjudicates that? It depends on the campus; in some campuses [adjudicative responsibility] will go to a dean or some administrative ofce. You would want the professor to be protected against harassment, and the student to be protected against harassment. [...]
MICHAEL ROTH If you are living in a town where you expect certain services from the town, and they do not meet your satisfaction, what do you do? In some towns you might call up the town manager, and in others you go to the service provider and talk to them about doing a better job of picking up the garbage, and in other cases you might sue. Te similar thing [analogy] in universities is that normally, in a healthy classroom environment, the threshold of harm becomes something that is discussed, and people try to fnd a way to be as open as possible, so as to discover better ways of thinking and discover diferent ways of thinking that might not be better for you. Tis is the product of a classroom environment where people feel respected but not just treated as customers who have to always be placated or treated as if they’re right. Ultimately there just isn’t one locus of authority for determining this. As someone who interacts with students and administrators (people on all sides of this debate), I’m curious what sorts of cultural, political, and other structural factors you think shape this discussion, particularly the intensive focus on the discursive you see in both demands for representation/inclusion and calls for the protection of absolutist “free speech.” What larger machinations do you think are behind this focus, and how do you think it realistically manifests on campuses today?
Again, I think it’s very hard to generalize. I try to go to things that will make me uncomfortable, and I fnd the rhetoric of many of my faculty colleagues extremely closed to ideological diference. And I’m not telling you anything I haven’t told them—my arguments for intellectual diversity get eye rolls from faculty as much as from students, because I do think it’s a real problem [when] lectures by people who think of themselves as radicals [are met with] no questions that come from alternative ideological positions or conceptual frameworks. So my job, the job I’ve taken on, is to talk about it, and to get other people to talk about it, even though usually they talk about it so as to disagree with me or say I’m wrong about this. But so long as they’re talking about what I think of as ideological diferences, I think they’re less likely to activate that bias automatically. So my work is not so much to bring those alternative ideologies to the mix but to call attention to their absence, and to have people refect on that. [...]
When I went to college in the 1970s, the right wing talked about the “welfare queen,” the cheat on welfare, and everybody could rally in opposition to this fgure, this scapegoat, or trope, against which the mainstream culture defned itself. And I think the “woke student,” who is so sensitive and lashes out at everybody—I mean, there were people who cheated welfare, and there are
students who are “holier than thou” and all the rest, but I don’t see it as as widespread as some of my colleagues do. And I do fear that there’s a certain thing that middle aged men especially do when they get outfanked by students, and that’s to start complaining that students are not what they used to be! It makes me very nervous. I think when teachers start complaining about students it’s time for them to retire. You have to deal with the people who are there. And complaining about “they’re not learning from me” or “they don’t agree with me anymore”––that I think is a sign of age, not of insight. And so that doesn’t mean that I agree with the positions taken by every one of my students (they would tell you themselves that they call me very bad names) but I do try to have the conversation. I guess the job is, as a teacher, to create a situation where you can create a conversation that might turn out to be productive. And the term I use, “safer space,” is a place where that could happen.
And I think that on many of the campuses that I visit I do see this happening. Tere are certainly pockets of students—there always have been—who don’t want to hear from people who disagree with them. I mean, when I was in college in the 1970s, there were plenty of students like that, maybe including myself. I think that what’s happening today is certainly amplifed by social media, and other technologies of group reinforcement that contribute to this polarization. But college campuses, especially classrooms, can be places where people are not just gathered together like they are on their Instagram feeds, by afnity and by mutual dislikes [...] or likes of others. In a classroom you actually have the chance to get people to talk to each other who have very diferent views, who may come from diferent races, who have diferent economic status—unless your department just attracts a certain kind of student.
INTERVIEW I do fear that at some universities and some departments, they actually do aim for that kind of insularity, and that’s terrible! And people in my kind of position, administrators and presidents, we should push back against that as best we can. Freedom is a precious thing, and we have to be careful, but I think we have to press back against what I call choreographed parochialism, whether it comes from the left or the right. I couldn’t help but interpret your notion of parochialism in a Foucauldain light. If all environments, including universities, impose a molding structure on how people think, how do you reconcile your notion of parochialism with a real and genuine progress, and what is the role of things like fact, knowledge, debate—how would those shape our views moving forward?
Tat’s a great question. I was actually a student of Foucault’s, and worked with him a little bit in France. My early work was on French Hegelianism, and Foucault was very modest: he would always say he didn’t know anything about it, but he knew all these people who did—because really, I was interested in his teachers’ generation. Tis is all to say that I do take very seriously the Foucauldian point that institutions like universities mold the thinking and create the criteria for things like truth that they then enforce; I’m fond of rebellion and hacking in this regard, creating the kinds of knowledge and certain kinds of people through these institutions. Nonetheless, I think it’s my responsibility to cultivate spaces in these institutions where change can take place and where reinforcement is less likely to be the outcome. I say this knowing that a sophisticated Foucauldian would say that itself is an institutional disciplining that you re-code in a liberal point of—[laughs] and I don’t know if I can really get into all that. But I believe in creating spaces where afection, solidarity and transitory mutual agreement on specifc goals can allow for personal and collective change. Whether the outcome is really progress or not, I guess, is always post-hoc judgement. And that’s fne; I make those judgements sometimes, but I think the role of a professor as a sort of institutional leader should be to cultivate those kinds of spaces. It’s difcult for me in a way because those spaces can take an anti-administrative stance, and often do, and here I am, the administrative daddy of the university. I suppose that’s where my psychoanalytic background comes in; I think the job of the teacher is really to allow for a rejection of a teacher’s authority, so that people can not just depend on that instruction. [...] MICHAEL ROTH
I do have to play my role, I think, both as an authority fgure and a teacher who thinks that authority should be undermined by a thoughtful consideration of alternatives to that authority.
Tat leads nicely into another subject––the role that exclusion plays in these debates. For example, in your New York Times article about safer spaces, you never touched on one of the most controversial aspects of the question, namely that safe spaces are often structured around not just sets of discursive rules, but as afnity spaces structured around exclusion, usually around an axis of identity or lived experience. Considering that federal law currently prohibits the formal recognition of “afnity spaces” like these—for example, I feel a lot of people are unaware of this, but, say, a black students’ group formally afliated with any US college or university [that] receives federal funding (so, anywhere you would fll out a Free Application for Federal Student Aid—private schools included) wouldn’t be
legally allowed to exclude a white student from membership on the basis of their race. I’m curious what you think about the necessity of these spaces of exclusion for solidaristic or intellectual work, or if you think there should be a moral demand to circumnavigate them; or to try to build people into the process universally and not reconstitute the logics of exclusion that led to peoples’ historical marginalization in the frst place?
As you might expect, I have sort of a wishy-washy pragmatist’s answer to this—which is that it’s really up to the people who claim the need for the space to make the case why that is necessary. So, I don’t think all exclusions have an equal moral value: to give you an example at Wesleyan, fve or six years ago, we required all the residential Greek organizations to become coed—before then, we only had fraternities, so we said women had to be allowed to be full and equal members. I’m still being sued—I actually lost a lawsuit—over this, but I also said, if you want to have a club on campus that is, say, for Christians, or for men, that's fne. Tat’s not the university’s business what your club is. But it is our business for residential life.
INTERVIEW So I think there are times that—as you put it, for purposes of solidarity or self-protection—some exclusion is important, I think that the logic of exclusion is also extremely dangerous, so that when you suspend a sort of open rules that sometimes seem desirable in order to protect yourself through exclusionary practices, that one has to [be] really aware of some of the side efects of such practices—but they may be less dangerous than, you know, compromising solidarity. [...] I don’t think there's an efective formal procedure to locate the threshold of when you should be integrationist or exclusionary. So much depends on the specifc political and social circumstances under consideration. So, I think freedom of association really is important, but when you replicate structures of exclusion that participate in the historical dynamics of racism or intimidation of queer people or other forms of historical violence, then I think universities shouldn’t allow that. But I think we should actually be very thoughtful about allowing some groups some modes of exclusionary organization because of their historical experience. So there you have it again, I don’t have a consistent procedural approach, it’s more of a historically and contextually informed approach.
Tat leads into some problems that you mention in your books—I’m interested in how we construct the “intellectual environment” in the Academy, and how the Academy is necessarily this tremendous space of exclusion,
and relies upon a model with tremendous structural contradictions. As you mention in your book, there’s often a tension between, say, admitting more low-income students [and] funding them better while they’re there, and other such conficts where the academy is forced to navigate these sorts of constraints. What larger political and structural changes would need to take place to really ensure an “ideal” or just intellectual environment? Oh my. I don’t feel like I can answer that question except to say that the American landscape in higher education has the potential to actually provide a very positive example in this regard. Tat is, some institutions could provide a very high quality education to anyone who applies. In other words, there are public institutions like community colleges where anyone who meets some threshold conditions (a high school diploma, whatever) could attend with little fnancial barrier, and professors are paid adequately. For example, you did some work with the Massive Open Online Courses? MICHAEL ROTH
Yes, one could do this all online. I also think it’s important to have small places and other kinds of universities where there are admission criteria that create a diferent kind of academic environment for students who want it— that can be quite positive. For several years I was the president of an art and design school—it’s a very diferent environment, and I think it’s really good actually, that there are design schools for people who learn mostly through making, and want to be surrounded by makers. But having afordable, high quality alternatives is where we fall short in the United States—and we could do that, but our government doesn’t choose to do so.
