Academic Freedom and the First Amendment

Michael S. Roth '78 became the 16th president of Wesleyan University on July 1, 2007 (inauguration). Formerly president of California College of the Arts (CCA), Roth is known as a historian, curator, author and public advocate for liberal education.

A professor in history and the humanities since 1983, Roth was the founding director of the Scripps College Humanities Institute in Claremont, Calif., a center for intellectual exchange across disciplines. He developed a reputation as a leader in the arts community through his accomplishments as associate director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and his success as president of the California College of the Arts in enhancing that institution’s academic quality, national reputation and financial strength.

Roth describes his scholarly interests as centered on "how people make sense of the past." He has authored eight 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, 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); Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living with the Past (Columbia University Press, 2012); Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (Yale University Press, 2014); Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness (Yale University Press, 2019); and The Student: A Short History (Yale University Press, 2023). 

Roth’s call for a “pragmatic liberal education” is the cornerstone of both his scholarship and his administrative work at Wesleyan. His three books published with Yale University Press all 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 across the country 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. Roth’s Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness (2019), 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 some of the principal models for learning that have developed in very different contexts, from the sixth century BCE to the present.

Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has advised officials at the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations on issues of law and public policy. He has served as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom.

Mr. Sunstein is author of hundreds of articles and dozens of books, including Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008), Simpler: The Future of Government (2013), The Ethics of Influence (2015), #Republic (2017), Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide (2017), The Cost-Benefit Revolution (2018), On Freedom (2019), Conformity (2019), How Change Happens (2019), and Too Much Information (2020). He is now working on a variety of projects involving the regulatory state, “sludge” (defined to include paperwork and similar burdens), fake news, and freedom of speech.

He served as Senior Counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security during the Biden Administration, where he focused on resilience against weather-related risks (such as flooding and extreme heat) and on reduction of administration burdens; he was awarded the Distinguished Public Service Medal, the Department’s highest civilian honor, in 2024.

David French is an opinion columnist for The New York Times, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. A graduate of Harvard Law School, David was previously a senior editor at The Dispatch and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is a former constitutional litigator and a past president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

David is a New York Times bestselling author, and his most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” David is a former major in the United States Army Reserve and is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he was awarded the Bronze Star.

Sarah Wildman is an op-ed page editor at the New York Times. She is the co-creator, producer, and host of Foreign Policy’s First Person podcast.

Prior to joining FP as a deputy editor, she was the global identities and borders writer at Vox, a position she originated. Sarah Wildman has lived in and reported from Paris, Vienna, Madrid, Washington, Jerusalem and Berlin. She was a Dart Center Ochberg fellow (a project of the Columbia School of Journalism) in 2015 and the 2014 Barach Non Fiction Writing Fellow at the Wesleyan Writers Conference. Wildman won the 2010 Peter R. Weitz Prize, from the German Marshall Fund, a prize awarded for "excellence and originality," in European coverage, a 2011 Rockower Award from the American Jewish Press Association for commentary, and a 2008 Lowell Thomas Award Winner for travel writing. 

Wildman has received numerous grants and competitve fellowships including an Arthur F. Burns Fellowship in Berlin, an American Council on Germany Fellowship in Berlin, a Milena Jesenská fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, and a Pew Fellowship in International Journalism (now called the International Reporting Project).  In March 2013 she received a Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting grant to report on the future of Jerusalem. Wildman wrote Paper Love, for Riverhead/Penguin, while a visiting scholar at the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.

Wildman is a regular contributor to the New York Times, Slate, and the New Yorker online. She has been on staff at The New Republic, a senior correspondent at The American Prospect and the Washington correspondent for The Advocate. Her stories have appeared in the Daily Beast, Newsweek, The Guardian, The Nation,The Washington Post, Travel and Leisure, New York, Departures, The Christian Science Monitor, Elle, Marie Claire, O the Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Glamour, and Jerusalem Report, among others.  

She lives in Washington, DC with her partner and their two children.