Wesleyan President Michael Roth Stands up to Trump Regime

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2:32Ben Meiselas:You saw students there walking out. And now things at the University of Virginia have got a whole lot worse. as the Trump regime has relentlessly attacked the university for supporting diversity and academic freedom. And their target was the president of the university, a guy by the name of Jim Ryan and the Trump regime. And actually, a lot of alum of University of Virginia who worked at the Trump regime were kind of pushing this, too. They were like, if you don't get rid of your diversity programs and all of the same types of threats that the Trump regime is doing to Harvard. We want to take a look at, we want to audit what you're teaching and we want to look at the political viewpoints of the teachers and we want to decide what books kids get, students get to read.

3:20Ben Meiselas:If you don't do all of that, we're going to stop the funding and you got to fire, got to get rid of Jim Ryan. We think that Jim Ryan's too supportive of diversity and academic freedom. And so we've told this story before on the Midas Touch Network and you may have heard it now. Jim Ryan, the very popular president of the university, he resigned and he just said, look, I don't want to resign, I guess. He said he was planning on no matter what, moving on in a year or so anyway. He just said he couldn't put himself above the university. And if all these other people were going to lose these jobs, if he didn't resign, he just said, you know, I'm going to step aside.

3:57Ben Meiselas:This is a very difficult decision for me, but it's under the duress and pressure, It was obvious of the Trump regime. You have Trump's Department of Justice person, Harmeet Dillon. She explained the decision recently on CNN and she says it. She says, look, you know, we thought that he was supportive of diversity and we thought that was a problem. Here, listen to what she says. So President Ryan stepping down was part of what the Justice Department, what you were demanding to settle the suit. Do I have that right? I wouldn't agree with that. I did express to leaders at UVA that we significantly lacked confidence at the Department of Justice, that Jim Ryan, given his public statements and his ongoing public statements and his participation in groups talking about suing the Trump administration to avoid having to do exactly what we are requiring them to do, I don't have any confidence that he was going to be willing and able to preside over the dismantling of the EI.

4:53Ben Meiselas:So they interpreted it as a demand that he stepped down, but that's, you didn't spell it out that's not as such but i will tell you that uh there's a lot of money on the line here and other schools have lost their federal funding for being being unwilling to comply with federal law it isn't just students for fair admissions it's title seven it's title nine it's title six and so you know we can't be giving out billions of dollars to organizations and institutions that refuse to fall. So the government is saying that it lost confidence in a university president because the university of presidents supports academic freedom.

5:33Ben Meiselas:I mean, you heard her say it there directly. I'll take us back to February 8th, 2025, where the president of Wesleyan University, President Michael S. Roth, wrote an article for Slate. Say something, For heads of institutions, it's all too tempting to do what's easy. He wrote that February 8th, 2025. Saw what was coming. Couldn't have been more oppression. Let's bring in the president of Wesleyan University, Michael Roth. President Roth, you saw what I showed you right there. You've been very outspoken. If I would say there was one university president who's been on the front lines calling the Trump regime out, saying their tactics are authoritarian, it's been you.

6:15Ben Meiselas:are you not afraid that they're going to come after Wesley? How are you doing it? And we don't see that necessarily the case with all other university presidents. How are you able to do it? Well, I think I'm just speaking the way I've always spoken in the United States, which, you know, we're supposed to be able to speak our minds and find out if we're wrong by speaking out and getting pushback from people. In the current atmosphere, though, of this regime, we have a government hell-bent on insisting on loyalty. So that nonsense you heard from the official Department of Justice is that nonsense.

6:53I mean, in the mission statement of the University of Virginia, there is a call for diversity. So this idea that somehow the University of Virginia's president and its bureaucracy was in violation of title X, Y, and Z is just totally false. what they have been doing is to work on their mission, which includes having a diverse community with people with respect and integrity and honesty. I think those are some of the words they use in their mission statement. And that was just too much for this administration. Diversity, respect, honor, integrity, too much for this administration. I don't know Jim Ryan well, Well, but Jim Ryan is a moderate guy.

7:40I mean, he wrote he had this he became famous because he had a commencement speech at Harvard several years ago, almost a decade ago. And one of the aspects of that speech was you should take a moment before you make a judgment and listen to what the other guy says. So that you might find common ground with someone else by taking a moment before you judge. and that we might together actually realize how we could work on something despite our differences. So I am clear that the Trump administration has insisted on a version of non-discrimination, which is quite different from the last eight years, really, or more than that, the last decades of civil rights interpretation.

8:24But I do think that the, I'm not a lawyer, but I do think that the administration can define civil rights enforcement in different ways. than their predecessors. And so I understand they do not want anything that looks like affirmative action. And I think reasonable people can work out what that means. In other words, the Trump administration is worried about discrimination against white people, or what they might call reverse discrimination. And they were elected on that platform. So I do think there are things that schools have to do to comply with this administration. And I'm sure Jim Ryan was doing those things as well as working to ensure that there was a diverse community at the University of Virginia.

9:07Because a diverse community, even Thomas Jefferson said so, a diverse community is one in which you can learn more. Everybody has the same idea. Everybody has the same background. You're not going to learn very much.

9:18Ben Meiselas:What are you hearing from university presidents as you speak to them across the country in this moment? How are they responding to this? And what's your overall sense of what's going on now as we're in July 2025? You wrote that article in February. Some of them did not say something. Some of them submitted pretty quickly. Others are standing up like Wesley. And so what do you say to them? Well, I think that many people are just scared to death of being a target of an investigation, which is costly. it's burdensome and it can result in people losing their jobs. So I have a friend who's active in higher education and works on pluralism.

10:00And he said to me, I don't think everybody should speak up, all these presidents. You're not going to get arrested, Michael, but somebody who's cutting the grass at Wesleyan or someone who works in the kitchen at Wesleyan might find themselves a target of an ice rave. And so you're putting other people at risk. So I understand that. That's a typical authoritarian playbook is to make everybody afraid and so that people who can speak out like me or other presidents don't do so because they don't want to put other people at risk. Jim Ryan, he resigned because he didn't want to see all these other people lose their jobs.

10:33I respect him for doing that. I have no respect for the board of visitors that accepted his resignation. They should have said, hey, we have a mission. We're going to stick to our mission and we will negotiate or litigate with the federal government. They didn't say that. You know, you described the governor of Virginia as a MAGA Republican. He's really not a MAGA Republican. He just goes with the wind. You know, I mean, the wind is right now a MAGA. He'll flow with that. If it was Republicanism like Nelson Rockefeller, he'd go that way. He has no standards, no principles. And so what's happened at the University of Virginia, which is so sad for that school.

11:11It's a great school. Is that the efforts to figure out how to build a diverse community within this new civil rights framework? Those efforts are going to be stymied. And I think that that university will suffer. And, you know, I see this less about UVA or about Harvard or about Western. I see it as a war on civil society. The Trump administration wants to ensure that law firms, that journalists, the entertainment industry is coming soon, that all of these groups, technology companies, all of them will express loyalty to the president and his minions. And if they don't, they will be attacked. And attacks are very costly.

11:58And I think those of us who can speak up, we may be attacked. But those of us who can speak up about this have to because it's our freedom that's at stake. It's not about Harvard. It's the freedom of Americans. It depends on groups in civil society not having to show their loyalty to any president, whether it's Trump or anyone else.

12:21Ben Meiselas:So before we go, we have about approaching six million subscribers here on the Midas Touch YouTube channel. big platform, your message to all the other university presidents out there or just leaders of organizations right now who are scared. I mean, obviously, your university's under pressure, just like every university is under pressure. So if they're watching this and they're worried right now, what do you say to them? I think you should be worried. This is an authoritarian government with lots of power to impose its will on organizations around the country. But if we don't resist that effort within the law, nonviolently, but if we don't resist that effort, we will lose our freedoms.

13:05It is so important to exercise free speech. When people say to me, as you did, and all the last five months people have been saying to me, how do you find the courage or the chutzpah to speak up? I say, why would you need it? As America, you don't shouldn't need courage to speak up. We have to call this out and hope that the administration will focus on things that it was elected to do. I mean, I have no doubt that they were elected with a different agenda than the previous administration, but that does not give them license to impose an authoritarian framework on civil society and on common American citizens.

13:45Ben Meiselas:President Michael Roth, president of the University of Wesleyan, Wesleyan University. Thanks so much. Thank you. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 6 million subscribers. The truth is more important than ever. Check out our new Truth Over Lies collection at store.midastouch.com. All 100 % USA union made.

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