Louisa Chiriboga ’29
Copy Editor
On Sep. 12, Scripps first-years gathered for a mandatory Scripps Presents lecture in Balch Auditorium titled “Michael Roth in Conversation.” Roth spoke about his 2023 book “The Student: A Brief History” in an hour-long lecture that received conflicting reactions from the Scripps community. What was intended to be a “welcome to college” lecture became remembered among Scripps first-years as a highly divisive moment on campus.
Roth is currently the 16th president of Wesleyan University, having taken the position in 2007. From 1983 and 2000, however, he was a humanities and history professor at Scripps, as well as the founder and director of the Scripps College Humanities Institute.
Over the summer, incoming first-year students were assigned “The Student” to prepare for the first part of their two-semester Core Curriculum (commonly referred to as simply “Core”) classes, courses that are designed to introduce new college students to the liberal arts educational experience.
“The Student” walks readers through pupilship throughout history, employing Confucianism and Jesus’s disciples as historical examples. The book emphasizes that pursuing higher education leads to true enlightenment, an argument that is tone-deaf in light of class barriers that prevent a large portion of the global population from accessing a college education.
Many students found the book unengaging and struggled to find interest in the material. The lack of engagement was on full display when Roth began to speak, circulating throughout the audience and requesting that students put their cell phones away. Despite the event being advertised as “A Conversation with Michael Roth,” that was far from the reality. Notably, for the majority of the talk, Roth chose to ignore Dr. Westenley Alcenat, Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at Scripps and the interviewer for the afternoon’s event. Instead, he chose to wander through the audience as he spoke. It was not until the last half hour that Roth joined Alcenat on stage and engaged in a Q&A structure.
One claim Roth made was that “critical thinking is vastly overrated.” He defended this statement by suggesting that critical thinking often lacks productivity because it encourages negativity, with students being too focused on finding flaws in something rather than building new ideas. Declaring this at Scripps, with a student body that has organized and questioned institutions and structural issues, felt inaccurate. Critical thinking isn’t destructive; it’s how many of us make sense of systems that were not built for us in the first place.
Roth also discussed artificial intelligence, offering what he seemed to think was a pragmatic approach. “Use the tool, but don’t become the tool,” he said. He argued that AI can be a positive resource when used carefully, ignoring how, by principle, there is no ethical way to use AI under current corporate systems due to its environmental impact, labor theft, data theft, and how reliance on it damages our ability to think individually and produce work that is truly our own. In an attempt to be humorous, Roth mentioned offhandedly how he calls his own AI assistant “honey,” a comment that was unnecessary and inappropriate.
At other moments, I found Roth’s comments about Scripps as a historically women’s college as well as his comments toward women in general to be condescending. He reiterated at multiple points how Scripps is special because it is “a place where girls can have intellectual friendships,” which carried a patronizing undertone that women’s friendships are usually shallow until an external source provides an academic excuse. Despite employing second-person pronouns, it felt as though he were talking about us as “girls,” not to us as students looking to learn with insight to offer the spaces we inhabit.
Most egregiously, Roth stated that colleges would benefit from having affirmative action for conservatives, especially for professorship roles, to provide students with a multifaceted educational experience. The suggestion was incredibly ignorant in light of the 2023 Supreme Court decision to eliminate affirmative action policies in college applications and the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs under the Trump administration that protect actually marginalized students. Beyond the insensitivity, his claim lacked substance due to the fact that progressive individuals simply tend to be the ones entering the educational sphere—probably because a quality education can offer one the opportunity to develop empathy, skepticism, and, yes, critical thinking.
“A good student can make other students better,” Roth said. This one fleeting comment resonated with me from his talk. As a Scripps first-year, it gave me hope and excitement at the prospect of our student body collectively building knowledge and manifesting it positively, something I have already witnessed in my classes and have participated in.
While Roth’s lecture was supposed to introduce us to the Core curriculum, a program designed to encourage community and dialogue, the event highlighted exactly what happens when authority mistakes itself for wisdom. If the goal was to “welcome” first years to academic life, Roth’s lecture did the opposite; it was a reminder of how institutions of higher education can still struggle to listen to the students it claims to support.
