Michael S Roth

Early life and education

A native of Brooklyn, Roth was the second in his family to attend college. He graduated from Wesleyan in 1978, completing his studies in three years and graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. While there, he was a member and eventual president of the Alpha Delta Phi Society; he designed his own major in the history of psychological theory. He later went to earn his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1984. Roth teaches every semester and, in May 2009, was appointed University Professor at Wesleyan. Roth is Jewish.

Academic Career

Roth has described his scholarly interests as centered on “how people make sense of the past.” He has edited many volumes in intellectual and cultural history and is the author of five books: 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 University Press, 1988); The Ironist’s Cage: Trauma, Memory and the Construction of History (Columbia University Press, 1995); and Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed, with Clare Lyons and Charles Merewether (Getty Research Institute, 1997). His current book Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living With the Past was published in the fall of 2011 by Columbia University Press. "[H]e is currently preparing his next book, Why Liberal Education Matters, for Yale University Press."

Roth co-edited Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture, Film, Photography and The Urban Landscape and Disturbing Remains: Memory, History, and Crisis in the Twentieth Century (both Getty Research Institute, 2001). Roth has published, in recent years, essays and book reviews in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Huffington Post, Book Forum, Rethinking History, and Wesleyan's History and Theory.

Presidency

Roth has undertaken several initiatives at Wesleyan, including growing the endowment, re-orienting fundraising and spending to emphasize support for financial aid and core academic programs, increasing grant support for University undergraduates who receive financial aid, providing scholarships for veterans of the military, working with faculty on interdisciplinary and curricular initiatives, and working "to anchor civic engagement and innovation within the University’s curriculum." With regard to the latter, the University announced in May 2011 a $2 million donation to establish the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship, which will support students who want to create programs and organizations serving the public good anywhere in the world.

His career has not been without controversy. He publicly condemned the academic boycott of Israeli institutions made by the American Studies Association and other scholarly organizations as part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, a stance that attracted further protest from many Wesleyan alumni. In 2012, he had a public confrontation with a reporter from Democracy Now! during student protests against Wesleyan's decision to end need-blind admissions. And more recently, he found himself under fire from Asian-American students for a lack of support for ethnic studies.

Roth has overseen the launch of "[t]he Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, which links intellectual work on campus to policy issues nationally and internationally", "the Shapiro Creative Writing Center, which brings together students and faculty seriously engaged in writing" and the Usdan University Center. The former two opened in the fall of 2009. A College of the Environment also has been launched and serves as the University's third multidisciplinary College in addition to the College of Social Studies and the College of Letters.

Roth has been maintaining a blog about his experiences as president of the University.

In Winter 2008, he approved a decision to remove "the annual music and arts festival Zonker Harris Day" from the University's calendar of events, saying: "The institution should make it clear that it's not supporting things that are stupid." The Wesleyan college newspaper noted: "The annual celebration references a perpetually-stoned character in Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip, inspiring University participants to emulate Zonker Harris's drug habits." The day was renamed "Ze Who Must Not Be Named." The decision earned Roth an appearance in a Doonesbury strip in Autumn 2010. On March 22, 2011, the university administration officially reversed its decision on the festival's name. The festival was again known as Zonker Harris Day beginning with the 2011 festival in April.