Why Liberal Education Matters
Michael S. Roth is president of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut where he has served since 2007. Known as a historian, curator and author, Roth was previously 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.
Author and curator (most notably of the exhibition “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture,” which opened at the Library of Congress in 1998), Roth describes his scholarly interests as centered on “how people make sense of the past.” His fifth book, Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living with the Past was published in 2012. His most recent book, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (2014), is a stirring plea for the kind of education that has, he believes, since the founding of the nation cultivated individual freedom, promulgated civic virtue, and instilled hope for the future.
He regularly publishes essays, book reviews, and commentaries in the national media and scholarly journals. He continues to teach undergraduate courses and through Coursera and MOOCs, the most recent being “How to Change the World.”
Critics of higher education have attacked liberal education for its perceived irrelevance and elitism—often calling for more vocational instruction. In his Athenaeum talk, Roth will focus on important moments and seminal thinkers in America’s long-running argument over vocational versus liberal education, including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, Jane Addams and John Dewey to develop his own defense of a “pragmatic liberal education.”
President Roth’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Salvatori Center.
Read more about Michael S. Roth…
View Video: YouTube with Michael Roth
Food for Thought: Podcast with Michael Roth