Michael Roth

How can we become students of the world? We’ve been thinking about this question ever since Michael Roth, President of Wesley University, shared his own journey to enlightenment at the NYC Morning program.

We all became Baret Scholars because we want a global perspective, but how do we do that while also preserving our own perspectives and identities? As a young man whose parents didn’t attend college, Michael Roth found academia intimidating at first, but fell in love with reading, especially philosophy. A great education, to his mind, is more about “cultivating human beings” than it is about producing scholarship. He believes that a great education allows a student to leave behind “self-imposed immaturity.” 

Roth argued, in line with the philosopher Immanuel Kant that being a good citizen, a good human being, indeed, was all about “thinking for yourself in the company of others.” We loved that idea: each person must be able to come to their own conclusions, but they cannot do it alone. That seemed to fit with our experience so far with Baret, where we’re constantly inspecting our own values and perspectives, and even changing them as we encounter new knowledge. Roth also emphasized the importance of seeing the world–it’s not enough to read the great books, getting out into the real world and acting with the conviction of your values is vital.

We’re out in the real world, that’s for sure. We’ve just landed in São Paulo, one of the great cities of Latin America. We’re going to be thinking for ourselves, and we’ll be in the company of others–a whole new set of perspectives from leaders from across Brazil and Latin America as we spend the next month here.

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