Molly Fischer:

Columbia’s capitulation was in line with a general trend toward circumspection. The memory of Congress grilling university presidents in 2023 seems to be fresh among leaders in higher ed: few want to risk either their jobs or their budgets by saying the wrong thing. A handful of exceptions have stood out; for example, President Christopher Eisgruber, of Princeton, who wrote a piece for The Atlantic about “The Cost of the Government’s Attack on Columbia.” (This week, the Administration suspended dozens of grants to Princeton.) But perhaps none has been as voluble or persistent as Michael Roth, who has been president of Wesleyan since 2007.

Roth is a historian and a Wesleyan alumnus who, as an undergraduate, designed a major in the history of psychological theory. His scholarship has dealt with Freud and memory but also colleges as institutions, in books such as “Safe Enough Spaces” (2019) and “The Student: A Short History” (2023). Recent years have brought an increasingly political thrust to both his writing (for national media and his presidential blog) and to his work as president. In 2023, in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action, Wesleyan ended legacy admissions.

When Wesleyan students joined the national wave of protests over the war on Gaza, Roth—who describes himself as a supporter of both free speech and Israel’s right to exist—tangled with student protesters as well as with those who wanted him to shut the protests down. Meanwhile, in interviews and essays, he took administrators at other colleges to task for embracing the principles like those found in the “Kalven report”—a 1967 document out of the University of Chicago, which advanced the argument that universities should almost always remain scrupulously neutral. (Such stances were, he told me, “a cover for trying to stay out of trouble.”) As the Trump Administration has ramped up its attacks on the academy, Roth has continued to publish widely, urging fellow-leaders to stand up for their principles. “Release Mahmoud Khalil! Respect freedom of speech!” he concluded in a recent column for Slate, which argued that the Columbia activist’s arrest “should terrify every college president.”