Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Michael Roth:

What’s at stake here is the freedoms of civil society. What’s at stake here is this great American tradition that you can work with the government, you can even be subsidized by the government, but the government doesn’t get to dictate how you think and how you behave.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Michael Roth. He served as the president of Wesleyan University since 2007. Beyond leading the small liberal arts school in Connecticut, Roth has emerged as a prominent voice in national debates on higher education. He was one of the first university presidents to speak out against the Trump administration’s attacks on colleges and free speech. He has also weighed in on a range of contentious topics, including affirmative action, antisemitism, and ideological diversity at universities. He joins me to talk about all of this and more. After the interview, I’ll answer your questions about ICE agents wearing masks during arrests and whether an attorney general needs a law license. That’s coming up, stay tuned. It doesn’t seem like a great time to be a university president, Wesleyan University’s Michael Roth disagrees. President Michael Roth, thanks for joining the show. It’s an honor and a privilege to have you.

Michael Roth:

It’s great to be here.

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to start with a question that I mean seriously you might not think it so. It is a really difficult time to be a university president, a college president. They kind of drop like flies. I don’t mean to say that in a dismissive way. You’ve been there a long time, so my first question is, what is your secret and is it because you’re from Brooklyn?

Michael Roth:

Well, that’s not a secret. It may be, I feel like, I’ve got the best job in the country-

Preet Bharara:

Still?

Michael Roth:

… so I cling to it.

Preet Bharara:

Do you still think it’s the best job in the country, or has it become more difficult?

Michael Roth:

I do, actually.

Preet Bharara:

Is there something special about you and Wesleyan or-

Michael Roth:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. What is that special sauce?

Michael Roth:

Well, the first thing is that I am who I am because I went to college at Wesleyan, had such an important impact on me as a person. My parents didn’t go to college and I had never heard of Wesleyan before. I visited with a buddy when I was in high school, and I fell in love with the place, and it was a life-changing experience. I didn’t really know many people who went to college. My parents, friends, for the most part, didn’t. It certainly wasn’t anything you talked about. Yet, for me, Wesleyan was an opening of a universe of learning, and of interesting people, and of confusion, and of creativity that really changed the way I work in the world and gave me a profession, and so I was, in many ways, a very loyal Wesleyan alum and, in other words, not. I never went back to a reunion. I didn’t do any of the kind of rah-rah stuff that I now do. It’s part of my job-

Preet Bharara:

Now, you have to.

Michael Roth:

… and I enjoy it. I was in California until I became president of Wesleyan and didn’t really think I’d come back to the East Coast. I came in 2007 and we had some immediate crisis, the economic crisis. We had a horrible murder on campus in my second year of a lovely, wonderful student who was brutally gunned down on campus by someone who was deemed by the courts to be criminally insane. It was shocking and scary because he wasn’t found immediately. He said he wanted to kill all the Jews of Wesleyan when they found some things in his car. All of that went into my consciousness of this isn’t just a job like the jobs I had had before. I had this other role which was more, sometimes people call it, pastoral. Sometimes it’s a cheerleader, sometimes it’s a consoler-in-chief.

As someone who had been a scholar, a teacher, and I like my private time and all that, I found that obligation both awesome, in a sense of being terrifying, and incredibly meaningful. I hear people complain how hard it is to be a college president. First of all, I’m very well-paid. I work hard, but I’m very well-paid. I’m at a place I love. I get to work with really bright students every semester. It’s a challenge to manage hundreds of people with PhDs. Manage is probably the wrong word, get along with them-

Preet Bharara:

You have tenure. Is it like herding cats or harder?

Michael Roth:

Sometimes. I don’t want to give cats a bad name, but sometimes it can be a challenge. The faculty in Wesleyan, I think, know that I am a faculty member. I mean, the way it works in academia is that if you’re in the administration, it’s like you’re stripped off your faculty jersey and you put on an administrative jersey with an accountant’s brim, not giving them what they want. But the fact, I teach every semester. I have more students than most of my colleagues do and I find that very much an important feature of my work, and so we get along well enough. I think part of it is we’re structurally opposed. They want some things I can’t give them and I do make those decisions.

Preet Bharara:

Does being on the ground teaching give you street cred with your colleagues? Is that what it is?

Michael Roth:

It does with some. It does, certainly, with some students as well. A course I had in the fall had almost 100 students in it. For Wesleyan, the average class size is well under 20. I get to know a lot of students. I also do it just for selfish reasons, because I love being in the classroom. I teach old books mostly. In the last two or three weeks of the semester, we do contemporary things, but most of the stuff I teach are the things I’ve taught many times over the years and I believe in them. I believe that it’s really important for them to read Aristotle, or Aquinas, or read Jane Austen, whatever it is, and I want to find a way to convince them. When I was 26, I can convince them in a different way than I can now that I’m 68, so it’s a thrill for me, all of which is to say there are many challenges to the job but there are challenges for all jobs. I feel incredibly lucky to have the job I do.

Preet Bharara:

I think you may be selling yourself a little bit short and being a little modest, and I think a lot of college presidents would have said exactly what you are saying to me now, 5, 6, 7, 8 years ago, even as recently as a few years ago when I interviewed Lee Bollinger on the podcast. I sense a distinctly different vibe now at a lot of schools. Do you have any advice, dare you give it, to other universities, their boards, or to people who are aspiring to or about to inhabit the position of president of a university?

Michael Roth:

Well, it’s hard to give advice because schools are so different from one another. When I became a college president at the California College of Arts and Crafts, now the California College of the Arts, in 2000, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I went to see another president and is the president of the Getty where I had worked before, Barry Munitz. I asked what did he do with this board. I had a board. At the Getty, I wasn’t high enough in the hierarchy to interact with the board. He leaned in and said, “Let me tell you, my son, the secret what you must do with the board.” I’m not sure I’m allowed to curse on your podcast.

Preet Bharara:

You can. Go ahead. My dad doesn’t like it but-

Michael Roth:

Oh, he said, “Whatever the fuck they want is what you do, because they can fire you, and your job, first of all, is to build a board you want and then to get them to support the work of the university that you’re leading.” I thought that was really good advice. I told the faculty my first year, “If I ever tell you that I’d like to do something but the board won’t let me, check and see if you have your wallet, because the way it should work is the board should support what I say I want to do. If not, they should fire me.” There’s been a little bit of a running joke at Wesleyan that I threatened to quit too often.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I read that.

Michael Roth:

That’s because there was a chair of the board for several years, Josh Boger. He’s an entrepreneur himself. He founded Vertex Pharmaceuticals when it was a tiny little company. People say he thought of a board as a kind of inconvenience, as a lot of entrepreneurs, founders do. But he said to me when I asked him to be chair of the Wesleyan board, “That’s it. I either support you or I fire you. I don’t want a medal. I don’t want to tell you what to do.” I think it served our university extremely well. We’ve made some difficult moves, I’ve made some challenging decisions. I got rid of all male fraternities. I canceled hundreds of millions of dollars of projects in my second year that had been planned for the previous 12 years because I didn’t think it was fiscally responsible, and I changed the way we do really all our fundraising and our budgeting. I was able to do that because the board said, “Well, we don’t want to fire him, so we have to support him.”

When I had questions about how to work with China, there was someone on the board I could talk to. If I had questions about our relationship with the government, there was someone else on the board I could talk to. I got enormously important advice from people but great support. My advice to new presidents would be same ones like advice I got from Barry Munitz all those years ago, is that build a board that you love and that loves you. I mean, it’s really important to build a board that you can work with and that you’re aligned with. I’m very fortunate at Wesleyan that the board of trustees, which is 33 people, so it’s a big group, they often have spirited discussions with me about various topics, but at the end of the day, when we decide to do something, we’re going to pull in the same direction.

Preet Bharara:

They get in line. Is that what you’re saying?

Michael Roth:

Yeah. They get in line having aired their points of view and understanding the direction of the school. It’s very important for me that they understand our strategy and how we’re implementing it. These days, I write to them every week and send them things that I’m doing in the press or tell them what things are happening on campus. When I need advice, I can call anybody on the board and they make time. Whether they’re running a huge company and they’re traveling around the world or they’re in a small not-for-profit in the inner city, they make time to be helpful. I think that after all these years, I know the board very well and they know me well, and I think that serves the university in its strategic operations, that day-to-day stuff board members really shouldn’t be involved with. If you’re at a college or university where the board is involved in specific conversations about a department or about housing issues, that’s dysfunctional in my view.

Preet Bharara:

I want to spend some time in a moment talking about what’s going on in some college campuses and the attacks, there’s no other thing to call it, by the sitting president of the United States, but I want to take a step back and ask you about the premise of college. Who should go to college? I have asked this question, or a version of it, of anyone like you, educators and others, based on my conversations over the years with Michael Sandel, who was my professor at Harvard, who, in one of his most recent books, talks about how, in America, we valorize or over-valorize college. Who should go and why? And do you agree with the assessment that maybe we make a little too much about college when two-thirds of Americans won’t go?

Michael Roth:

Yeah. I hesitate to disagree with Michael Sandel because he’s so smart, but no one in the industrialized world has ever faulted Americans for being overeducated. I don’t think that we have too many people going to college or that Americans have too much education that is broad, and teaches them how to think, and how to make their own decisions, and that we should focus more on… Fill in the blank, focus more on what? The jobs of the future that won’t require education?

Preet Bharara:

Well, we’re going to have AI. We don’t need it.

Michael Roth:

Yeah. I think you could have a kind of education that teaches people how to enjoy a beer and television. That’s the goal, is to be complacent and kind of half high most of the time, or you can have an education that teaches you how to think for yourself in the company of other people and enjoy the process of learning about yourself and the world. That can happen without college. That’s for sure. I mean, it could happen in high schools. It doesn’t happen often enough. It could happen sometimes and especially in the schools that have appropriate resources. The good idea, the democratic idea in that question “who should go to college?” is that people who don’t go to college should not be penalized. I mean, that’s the good idea there. I think Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania and other governors in other states, in red states too, have made this decision not to require a college degree for jobs that really have nothing to do with a college education, and there’s a democratic impulse there to not punish people for not going on to college.

On the other side, is I think it’s really important that we increase access to college. That is we increase access for people so that they can learn about themselves and the world with teachers who have deep knowledge about their subjects. That can happen in community colleges, it can happen in four-year schools, it can happen in apprenticeship programs. I mean, I don’t want to say that the only way it can happen is in a four-year school. That’s certainly not the case. But I do worry about people, especially people at Harvard like Professor Sandel, who, when they say that not everybody should go to college, they probably don’t mean their own grandchildren. I assume what they mean is that you shouldn’t be penalized for not going, but it should be an opportunity for people.

Preet Bharara:

Well, he makes another point that I think jibes with the point that you made that’s related, and it’s the way we talk about college. It’s, I think, in line with what you just said. I mean, you said once, “I do think it would not be unfair to say we’ve bred a kind of condescension.” You’re saying this about the “fancy places”. When you define the quality of your institution by how many people you reject, you can create, unintentionally, an attitude of, “I’ve earned my superiority.” I don’t know that people object to or begrudge anyone a college education, but they don’t like to be talked down to, “What do we do about that?” Is that a problem?

Michael Roth:

It is a problem. It is a problem, and I think it does come from this focus on selectivity and the numbers of people you reject, which is not just colleges. It’s all kinds of organizations in this country that-

Preet Bharara:

It’s graduate schools too.

Michael Roth:

Also, clubs of different kinds that you… We don’t like elitists, but we like some elites. I mean, if you’re a Navy SEAL, we think, “Wow, you must be really good at these things.” It was really hard to become a Navy SEAL. If you’re an elite wide receiver for a great football team, we don’t say, “Oh, you don’t deserve it.” We think, “No, you’ve got extraordinary talents.” I think one of the complaints about colleges and universities is that they create an elite in unfair ways and that they teach people who have not really earned their privileges in the same way a Navy SEAL does or wide receiver does. They haven’t earned their privileges. They’ve acquired them in a variety of ways. I think that that is unfair, and I think there has been a backlash against those institutions.

One of the things you can do about it is to focus for our schools to focus less on how much more can we do for each individual student, how much more can we spend on each of the happy few who get into our school, and instead think, how many more people can we educate? How many more people can we open the doors of learning to? Some of the schools have done that. I mean, in modest ways, the Ivys have increased enrollment. We’ve increased enrollments in small ways, but a lot of the most distinguished schools in the country really do pride themselves on how much they spend per student well in excess of even what they charge, well in excess of $100,000 per student. Instead, I think it would be great to see groups of community colleges that are sponsored by the wealthy universities that would educate more and more people with high quality instruction.

I’ll tell you, if I may, one story about in this regard. We work with a great group called The National Educational Equity Foundation, and they’ve come up with this model where we offer credit-bearing college courses in high poverty high schools, Title 1 high schools. It says a teacher in the class to have videos from the professor at Wesleyan, or at Stanford, or wherever, and the kids work with the professor on tape, with TAs from the school, virtually, and with a high school teacher who’s in the classroom with them. If they’re successful at the same exams that are taken at the university, they get a college credit which they can then apply if they go on to college. They also learn that if they go to one of these schools, if they get in, it’s probably going to be free because they’re from a Title 1 high school. Most of them had never imagined that the school they hear costs 100,000 a year. For them, it would be free, completely free.

This foundation, National Educational Equity Foundation, they aim to educate a million students in just a few more years. We’ve had thousands of students take these classes. Now, what’s wonderful about that is we think they’re great classes. They’re Wesleyan classes, they’re hard to get into. We open them up to anybody in these Title 1 schools who the foundation picks out, and we expand our educational offerings, and we find talented people who hadn’t had the opportunity to show their talents. I think that’s what you want. You want an educational system that gives talented people the opportunity to develop their talents regardless of their background.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Michael Roth after this. Would you agree with the observation, speaking about your school, not all the schools that are elite, that the faculty and the student body is well left of center?

Michael Roth:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Why is that? There’s a question about your school, because that’s where you’re the president, but you could ask the question about any number of elite colleges, and I’ve never heard an explanation that made sense to me as to why that is.

Michael Roth:

Well, I think that there’s the old saw that, what is it, if you’re not a socialist at 20, you have no heart, and if you’re still a socialist at 30, you have no brains-

Preet Bharara:

You have no brains. Right, right. Yeah.

Michael Roth:

… or something like that. Part of it is, for a long time, young people are more interested in changing things than older people, and so that explains the student-

Preet Bharara:

That doesn’t explain the faculty.

Michael Roth:

Right. That explains the student side of things a little bit, although what it doesn’t explain is it has gotten… The tilt to the left has gotten greater over the last 20 years or so, maybe even more than that. When a conservative friend, who became a trustee here, asked me this question some years ago, I said, “Do you know any libertarians who would spend 12 years in graduate school to get a PhD and then take a job that paid $73,000 a year?” He said, “Then my libertarian friends are too smart to do that.” He said, “I can’t think of any.” I think that part of the tilt to the left has been that educated people are more open to change, are more open to… At least traditionally have been more open to change, and that they tend to skew a little bit to the left. In recent years, I think this has become a vicious circle. In other words, I think that colleagues in the humanities and interpretive social sciences especially, when they choose successful job candidates, they’re choosing someone who reminds them of themselves.

You have a situation where the English professor, or the anthropology professor, or the history professor says, “I’m choosing the best person, and their politics are a lot like mine.” They don’t seem to take into account that when you think of the team as a whole in the history department or anthropology department, you have really narrowed the possibilities for students. That is the students see that all the people in your discipline skew left of center or quite far to the left of center, and the people who take the classes for them like those classes, like to get that message, or they realize that in order to get a good grade, you tell the professor what they want to hear. That happens all the time despite professors’ protest. “Oh, I don’t want to hear myself confirm that they do.” They do, and I think it’s a real problem. I think that conservatives are right to criticize higher education, especially in these fields, for not being aware of the biases that we bring to the hiring process and to the admissions process.

I was shocked because I was naive about this issue until maybe a decade ago. I was shocked when a guidance counselor told me in a public event that it would be professional malpractice for him, the guidance counselor, to tell a high school senior, when asked, “What is your civic engagement?” as you’re applying to college, they want to show you’re a good civic person, it would be professional malpractice for the guidance counselor to tell the high school student to put down right to life protests. He said, “We all know…”

Preet Bharara:

That’s terrible.

Michael Roth:

It’s terrible. Exactly. It’s terrible. He said, “Yeah, it’s terrible, but that’s the world you’ve created.” I think that this criticism is perfectly legitimate, and I wrote a piece, 2017, in the Wall Street Journal, which they gave the title The Opening of the Liberal Mind. I called for an affirmative action program for conservatives. Everyone hated this op-ed.

Preet Bharara:

I didn’t hate it. I read it in preparation for these interviews, sir.

Michael Roth:

Oh, you did? All right, well.

Preet Bharara:

I thought it had a lot of good points.

Michael Roth:

Well, I knew I was kind of stepping on the toes of my progressive colleagues, and I have been doing that for the last eight years. It has begun to change. We have now other colleagues who recognize this as a problem in their hiring practices, discrimination against religious people, discrimination against libertarians, against traditional conservatives. Somebody’s going to say, “Oh, you want us to hire a Nazi?” Of course, I don’t. The idea that the choices between the narrow group on the left and narrow group on the right is a false choice. But I think that academia, in these fields especially, has a lot of work to do. It’s not a conspiracy, I think. I think it is a situation of implicit bias that we can correct by talking about it and raising the issue on campuses.

The Trump administration’s attempt to correct it by imposing so-called independent auditors on universities who will measure viewpoint diversity seems to me a disaster as a response to this, because they can’t manage that. They don’t know how to do that. Just one last point, there are some fields that are skewed ideologically in ways that raise similar questions. For example, if you look at pediatricians in the United States, they’re much further to the left than orthopedists. Does that mean there’s a problem that you want to get more people like… A mosque who says empathy is the suicidal impulse of the Western civilization, you want those people as pediatricians? No, I don’t think that’s the idea.

Preet Bharara:

This is exactly the point that I wanted to pursue about the causation and the origins of all this. I’m guessing it’s not the case, that even with years of or generations of, if you think it’s been that long, of this bias being in place, that a university like Wesleyan, or Harvard, or any of the others gets 10 qualified PhD applicants to the history program, and five are classic conservatives, and five are classic liberals, and they only accept the liberals. I’m guessing the applications are skewed, and there are other professions. You mentioned pediatricians.

I was just thinking as you were speaking that, from my background in law enforcement, it is widely understood that police officers, FBI agents, and others notwithstanding some BS that people try to feed you about Hillary Clinton and other things, and the military overwhelmingly conservative compared to the liberal members of those professions. I don’t know that we say, “Hey, that’s bad. That’s terrible. That’s wrong.” There’s no affirmative action program for liberals in the Navy or in the Air Force, and I’m not sure that there should be. Can it just be the case that certain endeavors are naturally the ambitions of people who have one point of view versus another, and is that okay?

Michael Roth:

It certainly can be. For the case of pediatricians, I think that’s a great explanation. I wouldn’t want to muck with the system of who becomes a pediatrician. The kind of personality traits that go into that choice may overlap more with the ideological proclivities of liberals than they do with conservatives. On the other hand, I think if you’re teaching in a history department and you want to give students a array of approaches to understanding the past, then being aware of ideological filters can be very important in the hiring process. When I said to my faculty initially that I wanted to have this conversation about intellectual diversity on campus, I was told, “Oh, listen. We’re not biased. We only hire the best, and the best people who are drawn to anthropology or history are people like us.” I told them, “That sounded exactly like those old white farts at Princeton when I was a student there who were excellent historians.”

We said, “Why don’t you ever hire women?” They said, “Well, we hired Natalie Davis and that we’re done.” They said, “We only hire the best.” I said, “But they weren’t just hiring the best. Their view of what the best was excluded some people.”

Preet Bharara:

Was very skewed. Yeah.

Michael Roth:

I believe that if the historians or the English department professors are aware of this, if they think twice or three times about it, then we’ll probably move organically into a more balanced situation, if those applicants are there. Recent study I saw in The Chronicle of Higher Education said that the applications for these jobs are skewing even more to the left, which speaks to what you were saying, Preet, that they just are attracting people of a certain ideological disposition. In the sciences, I think it’s different. They still may be left of center.

Preet Bharara:

I think it’s a lot less, according to the studies that I’ve seen, particularly when you get to physics, which is ironic insofar as the administration going after what they see as woke or PC run amok at universities, where are they trying to hurt the universities in their science departments, and with respect to medical experiments, where this issue to the extent there is one of lack of ideological diversity, is much, much less pronounced. So that’s unfortunate. I want to ask you a question about whether or not we need other universities for balance as opposed to or in addition to having more balance within a university. I had Neil Ferguson, who’s not shy, on the podcast a few weeks ago, who, for understandable reasons, touted the University of Austin, which is sort of a different kind of breed. Are you familiar with that university? Do you have a view of it? Do you think it’s needed?

Michael Roth:

I don’t know if it’s needed. I guess it has attracted some… I mean, I hear the market speaks. It has attracted some students, and I don’t know if Professor Ferguson has given up his tenured position at Stanford.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Well, he’s at the Hoover Institution, I said, so he draws a proud distinction, but I’ll let him talk about that.

Michael Roth:

I see, yeah. The faculty at the University of Austin is… I don’t know if it’s balanced, but it’s certainly a different kind of faculty than you have at other places. I’m not sure what they’re doing about quantum mechanics and molecular biology. They don’t talk about that very much. Most students at universities like Stanford or Wesleyan, more so at Stanford and the Ivys than at Wesleyan, they don’t study English and even history. I mean, Stanford has a hard time getting anybody to major in history, and they have an incredibly good history department, great resources, but the students are not ideologically running amok with crazy woke ideas. They’re trying to start businesses before they graduate. They’re majoring in economics and computer science.

Preet Bharara:

They’re going into finance. Large percentages of-

Michael Roth:

They’re going into finance.

Preet Bharara:

… the elite university graduates are going into finance, which people decry for different reasons. They say, “Well, they should be helping the world.”

Michael Roth:

If there’s a problem of indoctrination, what the heck? They’re trying to go to Wall Street. Now Wesleyan, of course we have a contingent of people doing that as well, and I love to visit them and ask them for money a few years after they graduate. But our students, in addition to wanting to go on in finance, are going on in education. They’re going on in the arts and entertainment, and I think that that’s what you want at a university. I think is a place where you don’t just have to choose one thing and stick with it. There’s a virtue to that, which is you can go quite deeply into that subject, but I think one of the great things about being an undergraduate is being able to explore art history and economics or comparative religion and mathematics. To the extent that you start a university to just give conservative views or alternative views, it will probably, over time, get more and more distorted.

That doesn’t have to be the case. I mean, as I understand, the University of Austin does want to have a great books program like St. John’s and some other places, and I think it’s very interesting for places like Wesleyan to interact with such schools. We’re hoping to create a network and a democracy project, actually, where we’re interacting with some of these new places, like the Hamilton Institutes that have been created in Florida by Governor DeSantis. I mean, these are meant to be places of conservative alternative history. When I’ve looked at them, they’re serious historians. They’re doing serious work.

Preet Bharara:

It’s all good. It’s good thing.

Michael Roth:

It’s good. Yeah. I want to have the connections to them so our students get exposed to their ideas and they can be exposed to our students.

Preet Bharara:

I want to talk about the issue of neutrality. We talked about the premise of a university then want to talk about the purpose of a university. I want to read you a quote that’s yours and then a quote from something from 57 years ago, in something called the Kalven Report, that I know you’ve talked about and have considered. You said recently in an interview, “I think the infatuation with institutional neutrality is making cowardice into a policy.” I guess that’s a provocative way of putting it, sure. I have friends who don’t believe that. I’m friends with presidents who genuinely think they’re encouraging free speech by hiding. That’s one point of view, and it makes sense on its face when you read it, much like the opening statement makes a lot of sense in a courtroom, from the one side and the other side. Like, “Oh, that also makes a lot of sense.”

Harry Kalven at of the University of Chicago, I guess, produced this report about university neutrality, and the report, among other things, says this. “A university, if it is to be true to its faith and intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encouraging the widest diversity of views within its own community is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purpose of teaching and research.” This is the point that I find hard to disagree with as I find your statement also hard to disagree with, and that is, “The university is the home and sponsor of critics. It is not itself the critic.” Can you square your view and that view?

Michael Roth:

Sure. I think the reason Professor Kalven came up with that report in 1967 is because the world was in turmoil and the university-

Preet Bharara:

Unlike now.

Michael Roth:

Yeah, and that’s why we have it now. It’s the same issue that you could get your head blown off by saying something quite reasonable because there are unreasonable people on your left, and unreasonable people on your right, and unreasonable people but who you can’t just afford to not pay attention to. In 1967, this, of course, was about the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. That report is taken to be a principle that would make the leadership of the university hold its tongue rather than to participate in public debates or debates on campus. I think that last part doesn’t follow. In other words, the university should be a sponsor for all these things and the university leaders should play a role to help sponsor those discussions in however that might work. In other words, sometimes the university president can help us a conversation along by not participating in it, by holding his tongue. In my case, let’s say, I’ll give you an example, a group of Black students came to see me some years ago because there was an affirmative action bake sale in the dining room.

They were selling if you were Black, you paid a nickel for a cupcake, but if you’re white, you had to pay 25 cents. The students came to me and said, “This is racist.”

I said, “Yeah, it’s racist.”

They said, “This is unfair. It’s unfair.”

They said, “We want you to stop them from doing this.”

I said, “I can’t do that. They have every right to say what they want. Even in the lunchroom, you don’t have to go over to them, but if you think it’s racist, tell them and explain why,” and they would explain to you why they think affirmative action is racism itself.

They said, “But you just said you don’t agree with them. We want you to stop them from speaking or at least say publicly you don’t agree with them.”

I said, “No. First of all, they’re doing a political theater. They’re making a point. You could do political theater. But I, as the president, if I disagree with them in public, it’s like hitting them with a hammer, and it’s just not the right thing to do. I shouldn’t speak out on that issue when the Supreme Court actually overturned affirmative action.” I did think I should speak out, not the views of the university but of the president of the university. In our case, we’re taking the action, shortly thereafter, of abolishing legacy admission, which was the policy of you got in more easily because of the group you belong to.

The Supreme Court said, “You shouldn’t get into the university because you belong to the Black group or the Hispanic group.” I thought, “You shouldn’t get in just because you belong to the alumni group.” There, it seemed to me the president should speak out. In the first instance, the president shouldn’t speak out because the students should work that out among themselves, sometimes it’s the faculty. The partisans of the Kalven principles, so-called Kalven principles, it’s like a four-page report as you know, it’s a brief report, they say that you don’t want to speak out on everything. I agree with that, and no one has ever spoken out on everything. It’s a nonsense.

Preet Bharara:

Then, how do you decide which things to speak out on, which things not to?

Michael Roth:

You use your judgment, just like you do. Who do you invite to the podcast? You invite brilliant people like me and you invite some schmo next week to balance it out.

Preet Bharara:

We know, no.

Michael Roth:

But you decide, you know what I mean?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Michael Roth:

You use your judgment. I think what the neutrality principle does, it says you don’t have to use your judgment, because if you use your judgment, you have to defend your judgment. If you have to defend your judgment and you’re in a group of conversation, I actually think that fosters conversation. That is, it fosters… Sometimes it’s debate, sometimes it’s conversation, sometimes it’s inquiry. The reason this came out in ’67 was to avoid those conflicts. The reason it came out again after October 7th or January, I guess, of ’24 in a big way again was because presidents found themselves in what they thought was an impossible position. If they spoke out against the terrorist attacks against Israelis, their pro-Palestinian students would be up in arms. If they defended their pro-Palestinian students or criticized the extraordinarily brutal war in Gaza, then their donors or other Jewish alumni would be angry with them. Both sides are saying, “You’ve got to say something,” and then they have a principle that says, “No, I don’t. In fact, I’m actually better not speaking.”

“You’re not better, not speaking. You’re just afraid to annoy someone,” but who’s they?

Preet Bharara:

I have mixed feelings about both propositions personally. But if you have a university with scores and scores of really smart people who have access to the public square, in a very serious way, they can all speak and say whatever, either as individuals or as members of their departments. Why do they need Michael Roth to speak?

Michael Roth:

They don’t. They don’t. I mean, I don’t speak out on tariffs. I don’t speak out on tax rates. I mean, a gazillion things, I add no value. I speak out when I think I have something to say that other people might find interesting to react to or I speak out on some horrible thing that happened in the world to display concern. I realized that second one is problematic because I can’t display concern about everything. I’m just like every other human being. In other words, I can speak out when I think my participation in a public conversation will be useful, and most of the time, it’s not. I have nothing particularly useful to say. These days, I’m doing podcasts like this and I’m writing a lot of op-eds, because I think the Trump administration is hell-bent on destroying the freedom of universities as part of its path.

It destroys the freedoms of civil society, and I think people like me who have access to platforms like yours should speak out to stop authoritarianism. Now, it’s true. There’s an economics professor here who agrees with me and they could speak. I encourage them to speak out. But when the president of the university speaks out, that person gets a little bit more attention, or sometimes it’s because the president can say it in perhaps a more powerful way. It’s not true for all presidents. Some presidents have nothing to say, apparently.

Preet Bharara:

Who are those? Who are those people?

Michael Roth:

They’re bureaucrats, and they’re there to raise money and to approve whatever’s passed by the faculty and the board. Many schools seem to want those kinds of presidents right now, and that’s why it’ll be very easy for strong government actors to roll over schools that don’t stand up for themselves. I think standing up for yourself means that the president should defend the values of the institution that have been claimed as the guiding values of the school for many years. There’s no principle that you must speak and there shouldn’t be one that you shouldn’t speak. It’s a question of judgment. I mean, Harvard is the great example. I joked in the fall in an interview that they passed this, not exactly neutrality, not exactly silence. I said they were pricing in a Trump victory because they were basically giving themselves the opportunity to not get in the way of policies that they would actually oppose if they read their own mission statement, but they didn’t want to do that because it would get them in the hot water with the Trump administration.

Preet Bharara:

How’d that work out?

Michael Roth:

What they’ve discovered, thank goodness that they’ve discovered this and I am grateful to the Harvard leadership for doing this, they discovered that the Trump administration is insatiable in this regard. They want control of what Harvard does, and so Harvard had to speak out and stand against this administration. Professor Kalven said that would happen. “If your mission is attacked, you have to speak out,” he said. His son, Jamie Kalven, wrote an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune two months ago, I think, about how his father would look at the events today, it wouldn’t be to keep silent when your university core mission is threatened by a would-be dictator.

Preet Bharara:

Can I ask you to talk further about that? If you’re an average American, some members of your family may have gone to college, some not. Why should you give a about this wealthy privileged institution called Harvard up in Cambridge that has billions of dollars in an endowment? Why does any of this business between Trump and Harvard matter?

Michael Roth:

Yeah, it’s a great question. It gives me such pain to defend Harvard, actually. I got rejected there and I’m like the people you just described.

Preet Bharara:

It’s an error that they regret, I’m sure.

Michael Roth:

I don’t know about that, but I’m grateful that I wound up where I have been. It’s easy to be skeptical about the world’s richest and, by many measures, greatest university. What’s at stake here is the freedoms of civil society. What’s at stake here is this great American tradition that you can work with the government, you can even be subsidized by the government, but the government doesn’t get to dictate how you think and how you behave. If you get subsidies on your farm for soybeans, the government doesn’t get to tell you you have to go to church on Sunday, or you have to have ideological balance among your farm workers, or anything of those kinds. It has not worked that way for decades, whether a Republican in the White House or a Democrat in the White House, and the idea that the government gets to decide how institutions in civil society behave and what they believe is anathema to American freedom.

I mean, American freedom has always been based in decentralization, that you get to go to the church you want, or the synagogue, or mosque you want, and the government, even if they’re not-for-profits and they have tax-exempt status, they don’t tell you how to preach, they don’t tell you how to pray. You don’t want the government telling people who are doing cancer research how to do cancer research, because these guys can’t even figure out how to use signal. I mean, they don’t know how to do it. It’s like I wouldn’t tell my molecular biology people how to teach molecular biology. They know what they’re doing. The fact that I pay their salaries, it would be so dumb of me to tell them how molecular biology should be taught or who they should hire. Now, there are some basic parameters on the margins that people have to satisfy in order to get government funding and that’s always been the case, but what the Trump administration is doing now is trying to get ideological coordination.

I want my board of trustees to line up behind me, but they could fire me if they don’t want to line up behind me. But what the government’s telling these schools these days is, “We are going to tell you how to line up,” and that is really counterproductive. Our industry, our healthcare, our culture has benefited from the relative autonomy of these institutions, and so the average American benefits, because you have a phone that the technology of which was first generated in a university or you get a vaccine, the basic science of which was first done in a university, companies can’t take on that basic scientific research because they need to show profits in a shorter timeframe. America had figured this out in the wake of the Second World War. Universities can get engaged in long-term research, the benefits of which remain unclear, but there will be benefits we’ve learned.

We see that because of the supremacy of American technology and science and the contributions to world health and culture that the universities, through their subsidies from the taxpayers, have enabled. The average person should be concerned because it’s an assault on freedom, and it’ll be an assault on our prosperity and our health.

Preet Bharara:

You don’t think that this is all about antisemitism at Harvard?

Michael Roth:

The Times anointed the-

Preet Bharara:

They got the biggest laugh of the interview.

Michael Roth:

Well, the Times anointed Eisgruber, Roth, and Garber as the three presidents resisting the Trump administration. I joked that it’s like an orthodontist office, three Jewish doctors. I mean, their-

Preet Bharara:

“Their parents must be so proud.”

Michael Roth:

I was doing an interview with a Jewish group, so they said, “Don’t make light of antisemitism.” I don’t mean to. I mean, I know there’ve been terrible antisemitic incidents all over the country and including on the Harvard campus or the Columbia campus, and I think it’s really important to deal with them. I’m sure that President Garber and President Eisgruber would think that too, and I think that that’s work that needs to go on. The Obama administration said to schools, I think in the first four years, “If you don’t clean up your act around sexual assault on campus, you can lose all your funding,” and then they engaged in this long-term negotiation and pressure to change the way sexual assault hearings happen on campus. Some of that was good, in my view, some of it not so good, but it was a back and forth over years. It wasn’t like we’re going to cut a billion dollars without any investigation or any discussion, so what’s going on here has nothing to do with protecting Jews. It has everything to do with ideological control.

I feel embarrassed that my Jewish colleagues, friends, brethren, are supporting a president because he seems to have our backs now while, at the same time, flirting with right-wing antisemites all-day long, or Christian nationalists throughout the weeks and months. I think the best way to protect Jews and others is by the rule of law and civil rights. It’s not by authoritarianism, because the authoritarian who’s your friend today could turn on you tomorrow. It’s the law that’s going to protect you. It’s civil rights statutes that are going to protect us. The fact that you can attack trans athletes, all 12 of them, and everybody, all these people, will cheer, but when you get done, who you are going to attack next? We should care about trans athletes, we should care about antisemitism, we should care about the attacks on Muslims, but we should not let this anti-antisemitism be a cover for increased executive branch power.

Preet Bharara:

Our universities, and their presidents, and their boards in solidarity with each other on this. In my world, there’s much commentary on how there was a failure of collective action on the part of law firms in the face of a similar kind of attempted domination by the president, and it’s ongoing. Are you guys all together? Are you a team?

Michael Roth:

Well, it’s a strength and weakness of American higher education, is there’s so many different kinds of schools. At Wesleyan, we think, “Oh, we’re not as rich as Williams,” and at Williams, “We’re not as rich as Harvard,” but 90% of the schools don’t have the resources that we have. Some of them are community colleges, some of them are public institutions, and so they’re so different. Some are 50,000 people, some are 1,500 people or less, and so that variety makes it hard to be on the same team. However, I’m really heartened by this recent statement organized by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, AAC&U, that have now several hundred presidents. I’ve been working on getting people to sign in a statement like that for the last month, and I think once the AAC&U got involved, along with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, they really generated a great deal of enthusiasm among many presidents.

I think there was a lot of fear. I mean, I know there was a lot of fear because I asked so many people. I asked more than 100 presidents to sign something, and a lot of people said, “I’d like to sign.” It was a very moderate statement, but they were afraid their boards would be mad, the government might get mad, but I think what AAC&U has done is they’ve created momentum so that you want to be on that list. You don’t want to be missing from the list. If you’re missing from the list, like Dartmouth is, the president has to go make a statement to the campus why I didn’t sign. She’s a very smart person and I read that with interest, but I think that dynamic has shifted towards more solidarity. It certainly helped a lot that Harvard came out while they were organizing the statement and said that it would resist. Having Harvard out in front, so to speak, is a good thing.

Preet Bharara:

Guns blazing in court.

Michael Roth:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

On that note, Michael Roth, thanks for your thoughtfulness on the program. Really a delight and an honor to have you. Thanks so much.

Michael Roth:

It was really a pleasure to be with you.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Michael Roth continues for members of the CAFE Insider Community. In the bonus for insiders, we discuss the meaning of thoughtfulness.

Michael Roth:

Thoughtfulness, to me, is listening intently, sympathetically, to a variety of points of view and experiences.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. Stay tuned. After the break, I’ll answer your questions about ICE agents wearing masks during arrests and whether an attorney general needs a law license. Now, let’s get to your questions. This question comes in a voicemail from Ed, who says-

Listener:

Hi, Preet. I would like to know about the practice of ICE agents who wear masks while they carry out their duty, like abducting people on the street and detaining them. Why do they wear masks, and is that legal?

Preet Bharara:

Ed, that’s a really good question and an interesting one. As a lot of people have been noting, and in particular in news reports, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE have begun appearing in plain clothes and, more oddly, wearing face coverings during some arrests. You can see videos on the internet of agents without visible badges, agency insignia, or any identifiers, but it’s the fact of the wearing of the masks, the obscuring of the faces of agents, that has people talking and that’s prompted your question. Well, there’s one particular video that has been making the rounds and has caused raised eyebrows. It’s one that captures the arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk, a PhD student at Tufts University who is an immigrant from Turkey here in the States on a student visa.

Now, there are a lot of questions that are being raised about the arrest, but for purposes of Ed’s question, what’s important is, in the video, you can see some ICE agents wearing masks. They approach Öztürk as she’s walking down the street, restrain her, and arrest her. Now, those images have, I think, understandably caused some people to feel unsettled, but you may be surprised to learn that wearing face coverings during arrests is not illegal, and it’s not, as far as I know, prohibited by any department policy or by any law. It’s also the case that ICE doesn’t currently have any specific dress code guidelines that relate to mask usage, so traditionally, like other operational details, the decision to wear masks is left to the discretion of the operations lead agent. ICE guidelines do, however, require agents to orally identify themselves when making an arrest and, upon request, as you might expect, to present their badge to the arrestee, so what to make of all this?

Historically, the wearing of face coverings in garden variety arrests is not really normal. ICE agents have rarely used face coverings in the past and only under very specific circumstances such as undercover operations or high-risk scenarios. In my experience, for example and as you’ve probably seen in television and movies, members of a SWAT team who are going in for a very dangerous operation may wear masks, and there’s a number of scenarios in which masks make sense. But every day, garden variety arrests that occur throughout the United States in every state in the union, you would think, “Well, why are masks being used?” Well, here’s the reason it’s being given. According to a recent report by CNN, “Practices have seemingly changed due to the concern that agents will be targeted as a byproduct of the Trump administration’s policies in a climate where the average person can use technology to expose an officer’s personal information.” That’s based on a particular record, law enforcement agents have been doxed before.

In 2020, the Associated Press reported that the personal information of some police officers, including home addresses, emails, and phone numbers, had been leaked on social media, so doxing is a real threat. The question is, what are we, as a society, a rule of law society that does believe in law and order but also believes in transparency, and openness, and democracy, what is the balance between the privacy interests, if any, of an arresting agent and understanding on the part of the public? There’s a reasonable argument that could be made that the masking policy or practice can seriously undermine democratic norms in public trust and law enforcement. Think of what it must feel like to be approached by masked humans whose identities are unclear. Clear identification of agents obviously reassures the public that they are interacting with legitimate law enforcement rather than unauthorized individuals. It’s not crazy to think that people might believe they’re being kidnapped by criminals rather than arrested by federal agents.

One Reddit user commented after watching Öztürk’s arrest video, “This looks like a scene from the movie Taken.” One could argue further that visible identification and a policy against wearing masks promotes transparency and trust, ensuring accountability for officers’ actions and enabling proper investigation into any misconduct or excessive force, so it’s an interesting question. I completely identify with people who are uncomfortable with the routine masking of agents. I think it’s also reasonable to be sensitive to the issue of doxing and harassment by people who are going after those who are just doing their jobs. On balance, given my experience and how I think about these issues, I think there should be a presumption against masking, but I’m really curious to know what you think. Is it ever appropriate for agents, generally, or ICE agents in particular, especially at this time and at this moment, to be masked when making arrests? Let us know what you think.

This question comes in an email from Rome, I guess not the place in Italy but somebody named Rome. Rome asks this. “This might be a naive question, but is it possible to disbar Pam Bondi in order to remove her from her position as Attorney General?” Well, it’s pretty early in the administration, and on the question of disbarring Pam Bondi, taking that part first, as much as you might be a critic of Pam Bondi, as much as you may not like some of the memoranda she’s issued, some of the positions she’s taken, some of the enforcement priorities she’s put in place, I don’t see a legitimate good faith basis to seek the disbarment of Pam Bondi. Disbarment has a very high threshold, but it is sometimes met. While we’re on the topic, you might remember that Rudy Giuliani, who was, at one point, rumored to be possibly Trump’s attorney general in the first term, he has been disbarred.

Former United States attorney from the Southern District of New York, former a mayor of New York City, he’s been disbarred in two jurisdictions, both in the District of Columbia and also in the State of New York. Why? For among other things, making demonstrably false and misleading statements while fighting the results of the 2020 election on behalf of Donald Trump. But the interesting thing about your question that might be worth a moment to talk about is that disbarring Pam Bondi, as a technical and legal matter, wouldn’t necessarily remove her from her position as Attorney General. Now, if someone who was the attorney general was facing disbarment proceedings and then ultimately was disbarred, you would imagine and hope that everyone in the country would be calling for that person to resign or be fired by the president. But the reason why disbarment wouldn’t automatically remove Pam Bondi from office is, as far as I’m aware and the record reflects, there is no requirement that the attorney general, a label that has attorney in the title, there is no law or statute that I’m aware of that requires that person to be a licensed attorney.

For some background, the position of Attorney General was created in the late 1700s, shortly after the founding of our country. It was formally established in the Judiciary Act of 1789, which provided for the appointment of a “person learned in the law to act as attorney general for the United States”. The law specifies that the attorney general should be learned in the law, but it does not impose any formal credentialing requirements like bar membership or a law degree. Now, you might think, “Well, that doesn’t make any sense,” but it can make sense if you think of the attorney general, mostly and historically, as an individual who presides as a leader and an administrator over a very large department full of lawyers who must be barred and licensed in the states and jurisdictions in which they practice, because that’s required.

If you’re going to go to court and try a case or represent the United States or any client, you have to have a bar license that’s relevant and active in the jurisdiction, but you can be an administrator of an agency, like the Department of Justice, I believe, and not appear in court, and not have your name put on pleadings, or indictments, or briefs, and you don’t need to be a member of the bar. In fact, again, while we’re on this little bit of a detour, you might be surprised to know that there are a number of governmental positions that involve significant legal responsibilities but do not, by law, require a law license. For example, I always thought it was odd when I worked in the Senate, specifically for the Senate Judiciary Committee that handles every manner of legal issue, handles the confirmation of judges, handles the enactment of crime legislation, handles the administration of the courts, the federal courts in this country, that, to be on the Senate Judiciary Committee, you need not be a lawyer to be the chairperson of that committee, you need not be a lawyer.

It was led for a number of years, during one period of time, by Senator Dianne Feinstein, not a lawyer, during another period of time, Charles Grassley not a lawyer. More surprisingly, probably to your ears, is the fact that Supreme Court justices are also not required to be licensed attorneys. Article two, section two, clause two of the Constitution, the Appointments Clause, states, “The president shall nominate and, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint judges of the Supreme Court.” As far as I can see, the Constitution sets no minimum qualifications, no education, no experience, and no professional licensing requirements for someone to be appointed to the Supreme Court. Now, you may find that odd because you need to be a licensed attorney to appear before the Supreme Court but not to be on the Supreme Court.

Now, of course, as a practical matter, even in the current moment when a lot of norms have gone by the wayside and at least in my view shared by a lot of other folks, a lot of incompetent and unqualified people are being nominated to cabinet positions, including the first nominee, to be attorney general, Matt Gaetz. It is still the case. I’m pretty confident that anyone who gets nominated to be the attorney general of the United States or a Supreme Court justice will have had a legal education and be licensed in good standing in any relevant jurisdiction in which they’ve practiced. But hell, who knows what the future may bring. Anyway, to go back to your original question, whatever the future holds, at least as a technical matter, if Pam Bondi were to be disbarred for some reason, again as a technical matter, her position as attorney general might not be in jeopardy.

This question comes in an email from Steve, and Steve, I really love this question. Steve writes, “Trump, Bannon, and their minions are trolling everyone about a possible third term for Trump, but they have been pretty cagey on how they would get away with it legally. If Trump does try for a third term, wouldn’t it be a good strategy for Obama to also announce his candidacy?” I like the way you think, Steve, because why not? Obama remains very, very popular, and if Trump can run, why not Obama? It’s an interesting thought experiment at least, but Obama wouldn’t be the only person that you could throw into the ring. Bill Clinton, still going strong. He was president for two terms, 1993 to 2001, and also the Republican living president George W. Bush, 2001 to 2009. My question is, why not all of them run? If Trump says that he has the right to a third term, then wouldn’t they also? Putting aside some very technical, and stupid, and asinine argument about non-consecutive terms, so my proposal would be at least as a thought experiment, let’s let them all get in the race.

Let’s have it be ranked choice voting, Trump versus Clinton versus Bush versus Obama. That would be a race for the ages, don’t you think? I’m wondering who you think would win and who would have the best shot in that four-way race. Send us your thoughts, send us your predictions to letters@cafe.com. Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, President Michael Roth. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @PreetBharara with the #AskPreet.

You can also now reach me on Bluesky, or you can call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That’s 833-99-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández, and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.