What is the purpose of education? How are we educating students for the future? What is the importance of the humanities in this age of AI and the rapidly changing workplace?

Michael S. Roth is President of Wesleyan University. His books include Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters and Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses. He's been a Professor of History and the Humanities since 1983, was the Founding Director of the Scripps College Humanities Institute, and was the Associate Director of the Getty Research Institute. His scholarly interests center on how people make sense of the past, and he has authored eight books around this topic, including his latest, The Student: A Short History.

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Tell us about your background and what brought you to write The Student: A Short History.

MICHAEL S. ROTH

So I wrote this book and it was a lot of fun because I had to learn so much. The book examines three iconic teachers: Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus. And I look at how each of those teachers encourage a certain kind of student. The student as follower, someone who will take on the path that you've developed. In the case of Socrates, the student as critical interlocutor or critical conversation partner, someone who will, in dialogue with you, learn what they don't know, how to take things apart. And in the case of Jesus and the apostles, I look at trying to imitate a way of life to transform themselves to strive towards being the kind of person that Jesus incarnated. And so that's the beginning of the book, these models of studenthood, if I could use that word, and being a teacher. And then I look at the way in which these ideas reverberate in the West across a long period of time. So I'm interested in the idea of the student before there were schools. What did we expect young people to learn even when they weren't going to school?

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ROTH

I've been President now for more than 15 years, and we've created I think six new interdisciplinary colleges in that period. There were two when I started, and they had been there for 50 years, but we've created a College of the Environment, a College of Film and the Moving Image, a College of Education, College of Integrated Sciences, College of East Asian Studies, and a College of Design and Engineering, the newest one. And I love these things because they bring different disciplines. In the College of the Environment, you can have a biologist, a dancer, an anthropologist, and an economist, and they're all worrying about a certain problem in environmental studies, but they come at it from different perspectives, and they join together in their work. That's extremely exciting.

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You really speak about experiential learning, the journey that is about the search and not the arrival. We could just take a plane to get there, but when we take the time to walk on foot, we can discover the landscape and the cultures and pass through history, time, and stories. There is really a difference between knowing the history and feeling connected to the past and traditions, as opposed to getting quick answers or using a machine to answer those questions for you. You make a strong case for the importance of the humanities. I know that you started a humanities center way back when you were at Scripps College. So you've always been interested in this and interdisciplinary study.

ROTH

There's definitely a shift that occurs in the West from education is really giving you the ability to take your place in society, to education as being able to create your space in society. And so for most of human history in the West, education was to show you where you would fit in, and you may have had a couple of options or not, but you were going to fit in, and you were educated in such a way as to enable that fitting. In the modern period that changes. It's less about fitting in than it is about opening a space for flourishing or for creativity or freedom. And I spend a fair amount of time in the book on college students and those privileged folks who get to extend their formal education in ways that are supposed to open themselves up to creativity, transformation, and eventually participation in the system. That creates their schools in the first place.

The humanities always encourage a kind of messy inquiry. Of course, you do need some skills, right? You need language skills. You need sometimes quantitative analysis skills. You need all kinds of things to make progress. And that's why teams are so important. You don't have to have all the skills yourself, but if you're on a good team, you know, somebody has quantitative skills and someone has language skills. Someone knows how to read text. Someone knows the history and politics. These are all great adventures when you're with a team like that. And the humanities generally, I think today they flourish when they remind students that, through their study, we can pursue and create meaning. Because I think we are creatures who still crave meaning and strive to create it or discover it, depending on the case.

I had the great luck to be an undergraduate at Wesleyan in the seventies. And we have had something here called the Center for Humanities that was established in the late fifties, and they've just brought people from all kinds of disciplines, and I would always go to the lectures on Monday nights, wrestling with these big questions about the human, about our relationship to the animal world, our relationship to the ecological world, the questions of meaning, of memory, and learning to take pleasure in learning to have questions posed to me by works of art.

For me, that's been a great part of the humanities, and I always found that being too tied to one discipline really got in the way of asking a range of questions that you might want to pursue. And so at Wesleyan as an undergrad, they encouraged me to develop my own major because basically, I couldn't decide between psychology, history, and philosophy.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Sophie Garnier and Aarushi Gupta.

The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Additional production support by Katie Foster.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).