On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN International’s “Amanpour,” Wesleyan University President Michael Roth said that there is a left-wing bias in hiring in academia, but, when it comes to the schools conservatives are critical of, “it’s not like they’re graduating these legions of progressives or radicals.” And “they’re not seeking to be political organizers in large numbers, they are seeking to play a role in the economy and in the culture.”
Host Christiane Amanpour asked, “Is there any reform or greater diversity, diverse opinion or faculty that you should be including?”
Roth answered, “Absolutely. I wrote in, I think, 2017, in The Wall Street Journal about the need for an affirmative action program for conservatives on university campus[es]. That’s because in the humanities, especially, and in the interpretive social sciences, we tend to hire people who are left of center. And I’ve talked with my faculty a lot about how this is a bias and we have to overcome our biases in hiring. The folks who go to graduate school in history or philosophy or English and spend ten years working on a PhD, they may be people who skew left rather than right in the world. But we have to be more aware at colleges and universities of the biases we bring to the hiring process. So, I would love to see, and have written a lot about wanting to see more intellectual and political diversity on campus.”
He continued, “But the schools that they’re attacking, it’s not like they’re graduating these legions of progressives or radicals. The people graduating from Harvard these days, they want to be in Wall Street. The popular majors, and it’s not like critical race theory, it’s economics. They want — or they’re going into computer science. And these are not radicals, these are people who are using their education to advance themselves and to contribute to the ongoing developments in the economy and culture. So, it’s just nonsense. If you look at the — especially the elite schools and what kind of jobs they take or what kind of jobs they seek, they’re not seeking to be political organizers in large numbers, they are seeking to play a role in the economy and in the culture. Here at Wesleyan, we have a lot of people who want to actually become teachers, and we have lots of people who want to become part of the entertainment industry. We’ve had — Lin-Manuel Miranda, has spawned generations of people who want to write the next ‘Hamilton.’ And he was a student here. And at many of these elite schools, you have people who are not graduating to be with lunatic fringe ideas, they’re graduating with ambition to make a contribution in the fields they’ve chosen. So, although I do believe, very strongly, that we need more ideological diversity on campus, and we talk about that all the time now at Wesleyan, I also believe that having the government choose people on the basis of your ideology is a recipe for disaster.”
Roth further stated that he doesn’t think there’s political bias in fields like chemistry and computer science.
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