#431 — What Is Happening on College Campuses?

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Michael Roth about the state of higher education in the U.S. They discuss whether concerns about wokeness were overblown, how colleges should handle campus protests, where universities should draw the line on extreme political views, DEI, why Jews should be wary of Trump’s proclaimed protections, perceptions of Israel, how the Trump administration is attempting to ideologically control institutions, diversifying viewpoints at universities, and other topics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to
0:21.5	subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made
0:26.5	possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here,
0:31.2	please consider becoming one. Well, I'm here with Michael Roth.
0:38.6	Michael, thanks for joining me.
0:40.1	Glad to be here.
0:41.1	So you are the president of Wesleyan University and also a frequent contributor to the New York Times.
0:47.6	Are there any other hats you wear that I'm not aware of?
0:50.4	Well, I'm a grandpa and a dad and husband and those are the main things right now.
0:59.3	I teach every semester still at Wesleyan and try to write books for mostly academic audiences,
1:07.0	but more recently trying to broaden my reach.
1:15.6	Yeah. So what do you teach? What was your intellectual and academic background? So I'm a historian and I was as a student at Wesleyan, I couldn't make up my mind between history, philosophy, and psychology.
1:24.6	And I had a fairy god dean, as I describe him now, who was a substitute dean.
1:29.4	That's the best kind. And at the time, he said to me, why decide, man? And he allowed me to make up my own.
1:37.5	What year was that accent from? This is 1976. I remember the ferns in his office. I think they were ferns and and Charlie, Dean Charlie.
1:47.0	And so he made up this major there called History of Psychological Theory, which I thought was I was getting away with something.
1:56.0	And as it turned out for the next 40 years, I worked on history, psychology, philosophy.
2:02.8	So it turned out to be right.
2:04.4	But as I left his office, he said, you ought to go to California, man.
2:08.7	And I had never been west of the Poconos, so from growing up in New York.
2:12.9	And so my girlfriend and I drove to California that summer.
2:17.0	I bought a tent. And then couldn't really decide always between philosophy and history, especially.
	...

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