Wesleyan’s Roth Denounces “Demonizing” and “Scapegoating,” Then Attacks Billionaires as Crowd Cheers

Plus, a postscript on Harvard hiring three former Biden officials

Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth as seen in a photo provided by the university’s communications office.

Wesleyan University in Connecticut has put up online the May 25, 2025, commencement remarks of its president, Michael S. Roth. The excerpt Roth posted on X highlights this passage:

Freedom of expression is vital for educational institutions—as are diversity, inclusion, and equity. That’s why the recent attacks on DEI are so misguided. Of course, we should practice anti-discrimination, but that won’t be enough to create the heterogeneity out of which a robust education grows. We need safe enough spaces for people from diverse backgrounds with a mix of ideas to learn from one another with courage and resilience, and we must ensure that access to those spaces and conduct within them are fair. We know how to do this without demonizing minority groups or minority opinions. We know how to do this without stirring up engagement through rage, scapegoating, and hatred. And we can do it, as long as we resist the attempts by politicians and their billionaire allies to drown us out with invective and fear mongering.

The 8 minute, 37 second speech was interrupted by applause exactly three times. One of the times was after the sentence attacking “politicians and their billionaire allies.”

It takes a certain kind of lack of self-awareness to give a speech denouncing demonizing minority groups and scapegoating and then in the next breath to beat up on billionaires, then wait expectantly for the crowd to cheer.

Later on in the speech, Roth said, “I am encouraged to believe that we may yet be able to build a politics and a culture characterized by compassionate solidarity rather than fear and resentment.” I guess there is a “billionaire allies” exception to the Roth opposition to a politics of resentment.

Billionaires are the one group—other than Zionists and, perhaps, tobacco smokers—that it remains socially acceptable to demonize on fancy college campuses.

Roth has a reputation as one of the more thoughtful college presidents, and his speech includes some lines about viewpoint diversity. This paragraph, for example, is pretty sensible:

Free expression depends on a diversity of viewpoints to be meaningful, otherwise we have only an echo chamber. In recent years, universities have undermined our own arguments for diversity by not working hard enough to promote intellectual heterogeneity on our campuses. The soft despotism of shared opinion has a counter-educational effect. In the humanities and interpretive social sciences, especially, the student doesn’t hear enough dissenting views when departments hire only faculty with whom they are comfortable politically. Teaching suffers when political views pass as dogma in the classroom. Complexity is given short shrift when progressive pieties—any pieties— are presented as conclusions.

If Wesleyan had more genuine intellectual heterogeneity and less soft despotism of shared opinion, perhaps Roth’s speech might have generated some boos along with the applause. Or maybe one of his colleagues would have edited the line out of the speech before it was delivered. In any event, any billionaire thinking of making a major donation to Wesleyan may want to write in a condition that the president not billionaire-bash to the graduating class at graduation, or at least that he not do it while simultaneously preaching against scapegoating, demonization, and the politics of resentment.

Harvard hired three former Biden officials: The May 27 post here, “Harvard Broke Rules to Welcome Back Biden Aides,” deserves some additional context.

A couple of sophisticated readers of The Editors (there are no unsophisticated readers of The Editors) noted that the policy limiting public service leaves to two years maximum is not the same thing at all as imposing a lifetime ban on rehiring former Harvard teachers who have left for stints in public service. Apparently there is a window of an additional two-and-a-half years during which professors can reapply for their old jobs with an expedited review process.

It also bears mentioning that in addition to Biden ambassador to China Nicholas Burns and Biden USAID director Samantha Power, the Harvard Kennedy School has also hired Biden National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who started April 1 as the “Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order.” One reader of The Editors suggested an examination question for Sullivan to ask students who take his class: “How do you justify misleading the American public when you know your president is increasingly senile and unable to perform his duties? Write the five best arguments explaining why this was an act of patriotism.”

It it might bear mentioning, too, that in the weeks before Power’s return was announced amid a Harvard hiring freeze, her spouse, Cass Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard, who also served as Senior Counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security during the Biden administration, was publicly minimizing Harvard’s antisemitism problem, writing, “I was an undergraduate at Harvard, a law student at Harvard, and a visiting professor at Harvard; since 2008, I have been a professor at Harvard. I have seen or been subject to exactly zero antisemitic comments or acts at Harvard - none in the 1970s, none in the 1980s, none in the 1990s, none in the 2000s, none in the 2010s, none in the 2020s.”

Thanks to all those readers who took the time to write in. And for those curious about the perspective Burns is bringing to Harvard upon his return, you can check out the transcript of the April 30, 2025, Charles Neuhauser Memorial Lecture he gave:

our career services and the agencies of our government are under assault from an extraordinarily cynical, misguided and damaging effort to take a sledgehammer to the Executive Branch and tear down major parts of it.

Nothing close to it has ever happened before in the history of our country. And it is being led by people who seem to take delight in laying off thousands of dedicated public servants in a single week. They don’t seem to understand the necessity of the United States having a strong, capable, experienced and nonpartisan public service to defend our country and advance its many interests in an uncertain and dangerous world.

I hope and expect that future American leaders with a much greater sense of the value of public servants will work to recreate many of these institutions—the U.S. Agency for International Development, Voice of America, Radio Free Asia to name just a few-- that have been so cavalierly decimated in recent months.

Great damage has been done to America’s global power and credibility….If we disparage our allies publicly, raise stratospherically high tariffs against them or even, inexplicably, question Canadian or Danish sovereignty as President Trump has done so recklessly, we will depreciate our leadership position in the democratic world…