“It’s a Vichy, France, moment,” says Wesleyan president Michael Roth. “You wind up sliding back and back, appeasing the tyrant. And I don’t think that ends well.”
He’s talking about his fellow university presidents who have stayed silent during Trump’s ongoing assault on higher education. “They will not criticize the Trump administration because it’s in their immediate self-interest not to,” Roth tells me. “Hoping that they just won’t come for you seems to me immoral—and a mistake. But clearly that seems to be the calculation most leaders are making now.”
