What are the key takeaways from this Making Sense episode?

Key insights include: **Faculty Ideological Diversity:** Universities should implement affirmative action programs for hiring conservatives, libertarians, and religious scholars in humanities and social sciences where left-leaning bias narrows educational perspectives and limits the range of questions asked in scholarship.; **Protest Management Framework:** Effective campus protest policies acknowledge students' right to demonstrate while enforcing clear boundaries against harassment. Schools that consistently discipline rule violations maintain educational continuity without canceling controversial speakers or allowing disruptions to block others' learning.; **Hiring Standards for Political Views:** Universities should disqualify candidates who actively support designated terrorist organizations or use classrooms for ideological conversion, but political views outside teaching responsibilities remain irrelevant regardless of how misguided administrators find them.

What did Michael Roth discuss on Making Sense?

Wesleyan University President Michael Roth discusses ideological diversity on college campuses, student protest management, faculty hiring practices, and institutional responses to government intervention in higher education following recent political shifts. Key topics include: **Faculty Ideological Diversity:** Universities should implement affirmative action programs for hiring conservatives, libertarians, and religious scholars in humanities and social sciences where left-leaning bias narrows educational perspectives and limits the range of questions asked in scholarship.; **Protest Management Framework:** Effective campus protest policies acknowledge students' right to demonstrate while enforcing clear boundaries against harassment. Schools that consistently discipline rule violations maintain educational continuity without canceling controversial speakers or allowing disruptions to block others' learning..

How long is this episode of Making Sense?

This episode is 23 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

Making Sense

#431 — What Is Happening on College Campuses?

August 25, 2025

23 min episode · 2 min read

Michael Roth

Episode

23 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Career Growth, Leadership, Design & UX

AI-Generated Summary

Published Dec 25, 2025

Key Takeaways

✓Faculty Ideological Diversity: Universities should implement affirmative action programs for hiring conservatives, libertarians, and religious scholars in humanities and social sciences where left-leaning bias narrows educational perspectives and limits the range of questions asked in scholarship.
✓Protest Management Framework: Effective campus protest policies acknowledge students' right to demonstrate while enforcing clear boundaries against harassment. Schools that consistently discipline rule violations maintain educational continuity without canceling controversial speakers or allowing disruptions to block others' learning.
✓Hiring Standards for Political Views: Universities should disqualify candidates who actively support designated terrorist organizations or use classrooms for ideological conversion, but political views outside teaching responsibilities remain irrelevant regardless of how misguided administrators find them.
✓DEI Statement Problem: Requiring faculty candidates to sign diversity pledges creates inappropriate ideological filters except when assessing ability to teach diverse student populations. Demanding commitments to specific diversity programs for hiring mathematicians or historians represents overreach that contradicts intellectual freedom.

What It Covers

Wesleyan University President Michael Roth discusses ideological diversity on college campuses, student protest management, faculty hiring practices, and institutional responses to government intervention in higher education following recent political shifts.

Key Questions Answered

•Faculty Ideological Diversity: Universities should implement affirmative action programs for hiring conservatives, libertarians, and religious scholars in humanities and social sciences where left-leaning bias narrows educational perspectives and limits the range of questions asked in scholarship.
•Protest Management Framework: Effective campus protest policies acknowledge students' right to demonstrate while enforcing clear boundaries against harassment. Schools that consistently discipline rule violations maintain educational continuity without canceling controversial speakers or allowing disruptions to block others' learning.
•Hiring Standards for Political Views: Universities should disqualify candidates who actively support designated terrorist organizations or use classrooms for ideological conversion, but political views outside teaching responsibilities remain irrelevant regardless of how misguided administrators find them.
•DEI Statement Problem: Requiring faculty candidates to sign diversity pledges creates inappropriate ideological filters except when assessing ability to teach diverse student populations. Demanding commitments to specific diversity programs for hiring mathematicians or historians represents overreach that contradicts intellectual freedom.

Notable Moment

Roth describes hosting Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia despite strong disagreement with his constitutional interpretations. Students protested in orange jumpsuits over Guantanamo, challenged his gender bias in calling on speakers, yet the event proceeded successfully with mutual respect maintained.

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Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, so if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, I'm here with Michael Roth. Michael, thanks for joining me. Glad to be here. So you are, the president of Wesleyan University and also a frequent contributor to the New York Times. Are there any other hats you wear that I'm not aware of? Well, I'm a grandpa and, and a dad and a husband, and, those are the main things right now. I I teach every semester still at Wesleyan and, try to write books for mostly academic audiences, but more recently trying to broaden my my reach. Yeah. So what do you teach? What was your intellectual and academic background? So I'm a historian, and I, was as a student at Wesleyan, I couldn't make up my mind between, history, philosophy, and psychology. And I had a fairy god dean, as I describe him now, who was a substitute dean. That's the best kind. And at the time, he said to me, why decide, man? And, he allowed me to make my own What year was that accent from? 1976. Uh-huh. I remember the ferns in his office. I think they were ferns. And and Charlie, Dean Charlie. And and, and so he made up this major there called history of psychological theory, which I thought was I was getting away with something. And, as it turned out for the next, forty years, I worked on history, psychology, philosophy. So it turned out to be right. But as I left his office, he said, you ought to go to California, man. Mhmm. And I had never been West Of The Poconos. So from growing up in New York, and so I drove my girlfriend and I drove to California that summer. I bought a tent and then couldn't really decide always between philosophy and history especially. So I became an intellectual historian. Nice. And my work has been on, history of philosophy and psychology over the years. I did a, my senior thesis at Wesleyan was on psychoanalysis and politics, and that became my first book, and then it became an exhibition at the Library of Congress. And then most of my work is in the scholarly world was about how people make sense of the past. So things about memory and historiography and how people deal with trauma. And then since I've been at Wesleyan, I've written a few books on liberal arts education and freedom of speech and safe spaces and things like that. Nice. Well, many of that …

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