Biography of Michael S. Roth
Introduction
Michael S. Roth ’78 became the 16th president of Wesleyan University in 2007, after having served as Hartley Burr Alexander Professor of Humanities at Scripps College, Associate Director of the Getty Research Institute, and President of the California College of the Arts.
A historian, Roth is known for his work as an administrator, scholar, and public intellectual. He is the author of numerous books—many bearing on liberal education—and regularly publishes essays, book reviews, and commentaries in the national media and scholarly journals. An outspoken defender of the value of colleges and universities and their importance to democracy, he was given the PEN/Benenson Courage Award in 2025 for standing up against governmental assaults on higher education.
Early Years
A native of Brooklyn and in the first generation of his family to attend college, Roth entered Wesleyan in the fall of 1975. He designed a university major in “history of psychological theory” and wrote a thesis titled Freud and Revolution, which would eventually lead to his first book and a major exhibition. He completed his undergraduate studies in three years, graduating with University Honors, summa cum laude, and Phi Beta Kappa, and went on to earn his doctorate in history at Princeton University in 1984.
Roth began his teaching career in 1983 at Scripps College, becoming Hartley Burr Alexander Professor of the Humanities there in 1989, and the founding director of the Scripps College Humanities Institute, a center for intellectual exchange across disciplines. He was also the director of European Studies at the Claremont Graduate University, where he helped to found the Ph.D. program in Cultural Studies. In 1994 he was invited to participate as a visiting scholar in the Getty Research Institute’s year on memory. Two years later, he was asked to lead the scholars and seminars program at the Getty. Roth focused research there on such topics as the history, architecture, and arts of Los Angeles, the representation of traumatic events, the problem of giving “the passions” artistic expression, and the role of the humanities in public culture. He also built partnerships with cultural organizations in the East and South Central sections of Los Angeles, as well as with international centers of research. During this time, Roth curated two exhibitions: Irresistible Decay (with Claire Lyons and Charles Merewether) for the opening of the new Getty Museum, and Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture, which opened at the Library of Congress in 1998 and garnered praise for its balanced and wide-ranging view of Freud's intellectual and cultural heritage. The exhibition traveled internationally in subsequent years. Research led by Roth at the Getty led to a number of publications, including Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture, Film, Photography and Urban Landscape and Disturbing Remains: Memory, History, and Crisis in the Twentieth Century, both of which he co-edited with Charles G. Salas and published in 2001 (Getty Research Institute).
Roth has written numerous essays and books centered on how people make sense of the past; including: Psycho-Analysis as History: Negation and Freedom in Freud (Cornell University Press, 1987, 1995); Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth Century France (Cornell, 1988); The Ironist's Cage: Trauma, Memory and the Construction of History (Columbia University Press, 1995); Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed, with Clare Lyons and Charles Merewether (Getty Research Institute, 1997); and Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living with the Past (Columbia University Press, 2012).
In 2000, Roth became president of the California College of the Arts, where he led the effort to revise the school’s curriculum to emphasize interdisciplinary work and liberal learning through the arts. The school added new academic programs, including undergraduate degrees in community arts, creative writing, visual studies, and animation, as well as master’s programs in curatorial practice, visual criticism, interactive design, writing, and architecture. His legacy there includes the development of the Center for Art and Public Life, which fosters community partnerships in the San Francisco Bay area and models ways art can benefit underserved urban neighborhoods and their schools, and the strengthening of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, which has developed an international reputation for its exhibitions and public programs. In 2006, the San Francisco Chronicle noted that CCA had evolved into “one of the most progressive arts education institutions in the country.”
Leadership at Wesleyan
In 2007 Roth became president of Wesleyan. Over nearly two decades, he has overseen remarkable changes to the university—including enhancements to its distinctive educational program, increased financial stability, and improvements to the physical campus—most notably, the Frank Center for Public Affairs and the soon to be completed life sciences building. Energizing the curriculum has been a priority for Roth, and he has overseen the launch of seven new interdisciplinary colleges emphasizing advanced research and cohort building: the College of the Environment, the College of Film and the Moving Image, the College of Education Studies, the College of East Asian Studies, the College of Integrative Sciences, and the College of Design and Engineering Studies, and the College of Science and Technology Studies. Other notable initiatives include the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism, which brings together students and faculty seriously engaged in writing, and the Patricelli Center for Entrepreneurship, which builds students’ capacity for developing sustainable organizations that make a positive contribution to the communities in which they are embedded. In cooperation with the Posse Foundation, Roth created a program for cohorts of military veterans, and he has invited retired military officers to teach at Wesleyan to broaden campus perspective and to take steps to bridge the military civilian divide. Under Roth’s leadership, the University opened the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, and new homes for the College of Letters, the Department of Art History, and the Gordon Career Center. Roth has expanded the faculty, increasing possibilities for student mentorship, and has worked to create more internships that allow students to connect their campus learning to their aspirations in the wider world. He himself teaches Wesleyan undergraduates each semester and has offered online and hybrid courses through Coursera and the National Educational Equity Foundation.
Roth’s call for a “pragmatic liberal education” is the cornerstone of both his scholarship and his administrative work at Wesleyan. His last three books (all published with Yale University Press) bear upon this subject. His Beyond the University (2014), has been a powerful tool for students, their families, faculty, and policymakers who are wrestling with the future of higher education in America. The book has been assigned to pre-frosh and to boards of trustees, and Roth has continued to amplify its message in public speaking engagements around the world and through essays in major media outlets. In 2016 it won the Association of American Colleges & Universities’ Frederic W. Ness award for a book that best illuminates the goals and practices of a contemporary liberal education. In his Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness (2019), Roth addresses some of the most contentious issues in American higher education, including affirmative action, safe spaces, and questions of free speech. His most recent book, The Student: A Short History (2023), explores models of learning from antiquity to the present.
Under Roth’s leadership, Wesleyan celebrated a record-breaking fundraising effort—raising more than $482 million, primarily for financial aid—and is now successfully embarked on an even more ambitious campaign. Roth has undertaken numerous initiatives to make a Wesleyan education more affordable, including a three-year degree program that can save families as much as $70,000. He has eliminated loans for students on financial aid, replacing them with grants. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action, Roth ended Wesleyan's small program that gave preferential treatment for “legacy applicants” and reaffirmed the University’s commitment to a diverse learning environment—making clear that intellectual diversity requires a commitment to free expression and thoughtful engagement across differences. As part of his commitment to internationalization, he launched the Wesleyan African Scholars program, providing a select group of undergraduates from Africa with 100% cost of attendance scholarships for four years.
Roth has made clear that he considers his undergraduate experience to have been transformational and that he wants to ensure that Wesleyan students have opportunities for transformational experiences long into the future. Intellectual diversity and the challenge of encountering new ideas will be at the heart of those experiences, he believes, as will an inclusive campus community that inspires students to go beyond what they thought they could accomplish for (in the words of Wesleyan’s first president) “the good of the individual and the good of the world.”