Last Friday could have passed for a lovely spring day on the Connecticut campus of Wesleyan University. Students with books and laptops dotted a green hillside; flocks of admissions visitors trailed tour guides; baseball season had just begun, and practice was under way. It was almost possible to forget the grim straits of American higher education in 2025.

Colleges and universities have been early targets of the second Trump Administration. In the past month, the Administration has announced it will investigate diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at more than fifty schools; cut hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding from such institutions as Johns Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania; and sought to deport international students involved in pro-Palestinian activism. Columbia received a letter from the federal government issuing demands—which included making changes to discipline and admission policies, and placing the department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies under “academic receivership”—to be met as a “precondition” for negotiating the restoration of four hundred million dollars in federal funding. The university agreed to these demands the following week; the week after that, the university’s president resigned.

Columbia’s capitulation was in line with a general trend toward circumspection was in line with a general trend toward circumspection. The memory of Congress grilling university presidents in 2023 seems to be fresh among leaders in higher ed: few want to risk either their jobs or their budgets by saying the wrong thing. A handful of exceptions have stood out; for example, President Christopher Eisgruber, of Princeton, who wrote a piece for The Atlantic about “The Cost of the Government’s Attack on Columbia.” (This week, the Administration suspended dozens of grants to Princeton.) But perhaps none has been as voluble or persistent as Michael Roth, who has been president of Wesleyan since 2007.

Roth is a historian and a Wesleyan alumnus who, as an undergraduate, designed a major in the history of psychological theory. His scholarship has dealt with Freud and memory but also colleges as institutions, in books such as “Safe Enough Spaces” (2019) and “The Student: A Short History” (2023). Recent years have brought an increasingly political thrust to both his writing (for national media and his presidential blog) and to his work as president. In 2023, in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action, Wesleyan ended legacy admissions.

When Wesleyan students joined the national wave of protests over the war on Gaza, Roth—who describes himself as a supporter of both free speech and Israel’s right to exist—tangled with student protesters as well as with those who wanted him to shut the protests down. Meanwhile, in interviews and essays, he took administrators at other colleges to task for embracing the principles like those found in the “Kalven report”—a 1967 document out of the University of Chicago, which advanced the argument that universities should almost always remain scrupulously neutral. (Such stances were, he told me, “a cover for trying to stay out of trouble.”) As the Trump Administration has ramped up its attacks on the academy, Roth has continued to publish widely, urging fellow-leaders to stand up for their principles. “Release Mahmoud Khalil! Respect freedom of speech!” he concluded in a recent column for Slate, which argued that the Columbia activist’s arrest “should terrify every college president.”

Roth and I met in his office, which is dominated by a round table where he meets with both students and his cabinet. Wearing Blundstones and polka-dot socks, he was loose-limbed and gregarious, and our conversation (which has been edited for length and clarity) was punctuated by the bright sound of batting from the baseball diamond just outside.

You wrote last year, before the election, that colleges and universities weren’t ready for what was coming. How has the reality compared to your expectations?

It’s much worse than I expected.

I had this idea—alas, it was in 2020, just as COVID was happening—that it would be great if colleges and universities took our civic responsibilities more seriously and really incentivized students to participate in the public sphere: work on a campaign, zoning commission, whatever. Rigorously agnostic about what they chose to work on. We found a few hundred schools that agreed in principle and we created a network. Before the 2024 election, we reactivated that group, and this time around, the institutions were much less likely to want to be publicly in support of even something so nonpartisan.

We’re really small—three thousand students or so—and I wanted University of Texas at Austin, and Michigan, other big places. Some of them did agree in principle, but this time, in 2024—in the spring, let’s say, when Biden was still in the race, it was clear Trump was going to be the candidate—the reticence of academic leaders was already apparent.

Last year, we ran a program called Democracy 2024. We brought people here—nice conference, all that stuff. And even a group of presidents that I helped put together for this purpose, they started talking more about “dialogue across difference” than participation in the electoral system.

Everybody’s in favor of not fighting and having better dialogues, and I am, too. But I’m more in favor of people working on campaigns and learning about issues and getting things done. And in the last two months, it’s become painfully apparent that wanting to have nice conversations is not going to stop people who are bent on authoritarianism. Right now, I’m not sure what will stop them, except successful court challenges, and even that seems precarious.

Watching the video of this poor woman at Tufts who was abducted by federal agents —I wrote my blog today about that. I think the government is spreading terror, and that’s what they mean to do. This kid isn’t a threat to security.

It’s a terrifying video.

I wrote to the president of Tufts—who I know, because we’re in the same athletic conference—and just said, “Is there anything you want anyone to do?” He said, “Thank you for writing.” And I don’t know his business. I’m sure he’s trying to help the student; that’s his responsibility, and I respect that. But I also think every citizen, but certainly every university person, should be expressing outrage.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts about how we wound up here. Are there choices that universities have made that have made them more vulnerable to attack?