Wesleyan University President Michael Roth received the PEN/Benenson Courage Award for standing up to government assaults on higher education as well as for his commitment to academic freedom. These are his remarks from the 2025 PEN America Literary Gala, where he was presented with the award by Saidiya Hartman, winner of the 2021 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.
I am deeply moved and more than a little frightened to receive this award tonight. As a poet friend said to me, “if someone offered me a courage award, I’d duck!” I want to thank my friend Saidiya Hartman for her gracious introduction, Pen America for this honor, especially the Benensons who have created it and my buddy Jenny Boylan. I also want to thank my colleagues on the board of trustees at Wesleyan, several of whom are here tonight. I can only do my work on campus and in the public sphere because they support that work at our remarkable university, my home.
I also want to thank my wife, Kari Weil, and our daughter, Sophie Weil Roth, for all their loving support. Sophie, a public school teacher with an expertise in literacy training, has to show more courage every day in her elementary school classroom than I’ll ever have to muster. And Prof. Weil, one of the inventors of the field of animal studies and a formidable literary critic, well let’s just say it takes more bravery to be the faculty wife of a college president these days than it does to sit at the helm of the administration. I am so grateful for your love and support.
We are all going to have to draw on love and support if we are to resist the slide towards authoritarianism that has gathered momentum across the land. We need writers and teachers, editors and publishers, to remind our fellow Americans that if you reside in this country, you have every right to due process, to speak your mind, to love who you want. We need to remind ourselves that free expression should also encourage an ability to listen to those with whom one disagrees. Free speech matters when the commitment to diversity creates safe enough spaces for people with very different views to explore those differences.
For a long time, I took my freedoms for granted. I was fortunate enough not regularly to face much danger as I went about my business. Complacency about our freedoms, we now see, can lead to complicity in tyranny. It’s time we wake up. It’s time we see clearly how much there is yet to do for what Saidiya has called the ‘incomplete project of freedom.” Let us recognize how we can advance that project in the face of resurgent authoritarianism. We know how to do this without demonizing minority groups or minority opinions. We know how to do this without stirring up engagement through rage and hatred. And we can do it, as long as we resist the attempts by politicians and their billionaire allies to drown us out with invective and fear mongering.
And let us find courage in one another’s good company to fight back against those who would take our freedoms away.
