On Monday’s broadcast of “CBS Mornings,” Wesleyan University President Michael Roth argued that the presidents of Harvard and MIT shouldn’t lose their jobs “because they would then be subject to these outside forces, the Republican congresswoman on the one hand, but also these big donors who are trying to throw their weight around. And I think that’s not good for the long-range health of these schools.”
Roth stated that while the answers the presidents gave on calls for genocide during their congressional hearings were poor answers, but when it comes to the presidents of Harvard and MIT, “I think that their own campuses should make that decision, and given the fullness of their performance as presidents. That was a four-hour hearing, and there was a terrible moment there that has gone viral. But whether they should lose their job, I guess, as a president, I hope they don’t lose their job, not only because of this — I belong to the union of college presidents — but because they would then be subject to these outside forces, the Republican congresswoman on the one hand, but also these big donors who are trying to throw their weight around. And I think that’s not good for the long-range health of these schools. It doesn’t really matter that much who the president of Harvard is.”
He added, “I do think we suffer from a lack of intellectual diversity in higher education. And I have — for years, I’ve called for an affirmative action program for conservatives on college campuses. And I talk with my faculty at Wesleyan about this all the time. Most of them disagree with me. They think they’re fully capable of teaching a religious text even if they are not a member of that religious group, point taken. Nonetheless, I think we should be very suspicious when people at a university or anywhere else hire folks who look a lot like them. That’s a mark of bias, or at least potentially so. And my faculty is very open to having this conversation. I haven’t persuaded them all. But my students are totally open to studying religious texts, radical texts, conservative texts.”
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