The following is the transcript of an interview with Michael Roth, Wesleyan University president, that aired on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on June 1, 2025.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And we’re turning now to the President of Wesleyan University, Michael Roth, who joins us from Monterey, Massachusetts. Good morning to you.
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT MICHAEL ROTH: Good morning. Good to be with you.
MARGARET BRENNAN: I want to pick up on something we were just discussing with the congressman, and that is this instruction to have new scrutiny of Chinese students, but also, more broadly, Secretary Rubio said all U.S. embassies should not schedule any new student visa application appointments at this time. About 14% of your students are international. Are you concerned they won’t be able to come back to school in September?
ROTH: I’m very concerned, not only about Wesleyan, but about higher education in the United States. One of the great things about our system of education is that it attracts people from all over the world who want to come to America to learn. And while they’re here learning, they learn about our country, our values, our freedoms. And this is really an act of intimidation to scare schools into toeing the line of the current administration. It really has nothing to do with national security or with anti- antisemitism. This heightened scrutiny is meant to instill fear on college campuses, and I’m afraid it is working.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, it is noticeable, sir, that you know, at a time when so many higher education institutions, Harvard, Columbia, Brown, have had federal funding revoked because of their policies, we find heads of universities are fearful of speaking out. Why are you not afraid of speaking critically?
ROTH: Oh, I am. I’m afraid too. But I just find it extraordinary that Americans are afraid to speak out, especially people who, you know, run colleges, universities. Why- this is a free country. I’ve been saying it my whole life. I used to tell my parents that when I didn’t want to do something, I would say it’s a free country. And this idea that we’re supposed to actually conform to the ideologies in the White House, it’s not just bad for Harvard or for Wesleyan, it- it’s bad for the whole country because journalists are being intimidated, law firms are being intimidated, churches, synagogues and mosques will be next. We have to defend our freedoms. And when we bring international students here, what they experience is what it’s like to live in a free country, and we can’t let the president change the atmosphere so that people come here and are afraid to speak out.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But there are also some specific criticisms being lodged by members of the administration. Do you think that higher education has become too dependent on federal funding, for example, or money from foreign donors, are there legitimate criticisms?
ROTH: There are lots of legitimate criticisms of higher education. I don’t think overdependence on federal funding is the issue. Most of the federal funding you hear the press talk about are contracts to do specific kinds of research that are really great investments for the country. However, the criticisms of colleges and universities that we have a monoculture, that we don’t have enough intellectual diversity, that’s a criticism I’ve been making of my own school and of the rest of higher education for years. I think we can make improvements, but the way we make improvements is not by just lining up behind a president, whoever that happens to be. We make improvements by convincing our faculty and students to broaden our perspectives, to welcome more political and cultural views, not to line up and conform to the ideology of those in power. But yes, we have work to do to clean up our own houses, and we ought to get to it. But to do it under the- under this- the gun of an aggressive authoritarian administration that- that will lead to a bad outcome.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Do you define some of the protests that even Wesleyan had on its campus that were, you know, critical of the State of Israel, for example, regarding the war against Hamas in Gaza, do you consider them to be xenophobic by definition, antisemitic or anti-Jewish?
ROTH: Oh no, certainly not by definition. There are lots of examples of antisemitism around the country, some of them are on college campuses. They’re reprehensible. When Jewish students are intimidated or afraid to practice their religion on campus, or are yelled at or- it’s horrible. But at Wesleyan and in many schools, the percentage of Jews protesting for Palestinians was roughly the same as the percentage of Jews on the campus generally. The idea that you are attacking antisemitism by attacking universities, I think, is a complete charade. It’s just an excuse for getting the universities to conform. We need to stamp out antisemitism. Those two young people just murdered because they were Jewish in Washington, that’s a great example of how violence breeds violence. But the- the attack on universities is not an- is not an attempt to defend Jews. On the contrary, I think more Jews will be hurt by these attacks than helped.
MARGARET BRENNAN: President Roth, thank you for your time this morning. We’ll be back in a moment.
