Cutting billions in research grants. Detaining student activists. Threatening to cancel accreditation. President Trump’s attacks on colleges and universities have left them reeling. But rather than speak out, all but a few higher education leaders have remained silent, perhaps hoping to avoid being targeted. Wesleyan University President Michael Roth thinks that’s a mistake. “This is the greatest pressure put on intellectual life since the McCarthy era,” Mr. Roth told The New York Times in March. “And I think it’ll be seen in the future, as that time was seen, as a time when people either stood up for their values or ran in fear of the federal government.” 

Roth says Trump’s “wrongheaded, lawless, authoritarian, fascistic” attacks on higher ed are not really about preventing anti-semitism or protecting national security, but about intimidation. The goal, he argues, is to force schools to conform with the administration’s ideology. 

He joins us to talk about why he decided to speak out, and how education leaders—and the public—should fight back.