Wesleyan University’s campus was abuzz last week after student protesters, demanding divestment from the “U.S.–Israeli Empire,” occupied an administrative building and refused to leave until the police arrived and threatened arrest. This was a new development for Wesleyan, whose president Michael Roth had boasted about not calling the police during the past year’s protests. His leniency didn’t earn him many friends among the demonstrators: in an Instagram video posted by the student group Beyond Empire, students shout “shame on you” at Roth as he walks away—under the floating text, “f— michael roth.”
It’s hard to feel sorry for Roth, though. As my colleague at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) Steve McGuire was quick to point out, he published a New York Times op-ed at the beginning of September titled “I’m a College President, and I Hope My Campus Is Even More Political This Year.”
Clickbait headline aside, much of what Roth says in the op-ed would be unobjectionable were it not for the deplorable occurrences on American campuses over the past year. He decries the vision of a college education as merely a means to make a better living, arguing instead that colleges should lean into their “civic mission” of preparing students to be better citizens, capable of respectful and productive disagreement. In pursuit of this mission, he says, professors should use the classroom not to indoctrinate students but rather to challenge them to think deeply about how we ought to live in a community.
If a campus being “political” means that its professors are educating students with an eye toward responsible citizenship, then many of us at ACTA and elsewhere would also like to see campuses be more political. Students are woefully ignorant of American history and government. Colleges would do well to mandate basic civics lessons to teach students how to think critically about America’s past and to form well-reasoned arguments about shaping America’s future.
But Wesleyan, like most elite institutions, does not require undergraduates to take civics courses, and Roth did not take to the pages of the New York Times to lament civic illiteracy. Rather, he was defending the pro-Hamas protesters on his campus, suggesting that their activities play an important role in the university’s civic mission. Granted, protests can play such a role, but only if the university also takes the opportunity to teach students about civic responsibility and the rule of law by enforcing the time, place, and manner restrictions that students agreed to obey when they matriculated.
In any case, Roth is either naively conflating or willfully obscuring the crucial difference between academic discussions about Israel, on the one hand, and student and faculty protesters demanding divestment, on the other. It’s the difference between a political campus and what we might call a politicized campus.
On a political campus, the university is a neutral forum for political actors to test out their ideas. The university offers both curricular and extracurricular opportunities for students and faculty to engage productively with questions about our nation, its policies, and its place in the world.
On a politicized campus, by contrast, the university itself becomes a political actor, putting its thumb on the national scale. Senior administrators, speaking on behalf of the institution, take official stances on hot-button issues that have nothing to do with the functioning of the university, and activist students and professors, smelling an opportunity to advance their causes, lobby senior administrators for more—more statements and more actions, that is.
The focus shifts away from studying the pros and cons of different political positions and moves instead toward ensuring that the university is using its resources to promote a particular position. In the eyes of the students who run the show, it’s not enough for the university to, say, “host an open forum of 500 students from Palestine, Dubai, Kuwait, Israel, China, and Europe.” The university must sever ties with Israeli academics and divest from all “companies profiting from the genocide of the Palestinian people.”
Thankfully, Wesleyan’s Board of Trustees voted to reject the students’ proposal for divestment. But it was a sign of the misplaced notions of shared governance that the matter came before the board in the first place. And a university at which a whopping 86 percent of students (out of the 57 percent who participated in the referendum) reportedly voted to divest from Israel is one that’s failing at its civic mission.
Make no mistake: a political campus and a politicized campus are mutually exclusive. A politicized campus stifles, either implicitly or explicitly, the free exchange of ideas that is the lifeblood of democracy. Whenever the university takes an official stand on a political issue, as Roth’s Wesleyan so often and enthusiastically does, dissenters will feel institutional pressure to keep quiet.
So yes, President Roth, I, too, hope your campus becomes more political this year, full of spirited academic discussions that prepare your students to be good citizens, bursting with informed ideas about how to improve our world. But first, your campus must become much less politicized. For that, the onus is on you.
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images