New York City — Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., and part-time resident of Monterey, has been awarded the 2025 PEN Courage/Benenson award for “standing up to government assaults on higher education as well as for his commitment to academic freedom.”
PEN America, a New York-based nonprofit literary organization founded in 1922, seeks to promote freedom of expression and human rights.
Roth has been outspoken on behalf of all universities’ right to protect student free speech from outside threat and has addressed this idea frequently. His opinion pieces have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Politico, and Inside Higher Ed, where he wrote, “In an emergency we should not be distracted by the noise around us, however jarring.”
Roth learned of the honor in April. “I was very surprised,” he said. “I do not think of myself as a brave person. But when our freedoms are threatened by violations of the Constitution, I feel it’s my duty to object.”
Kari Weil, a professor at Wesleyan and Roth’s wife, said she “believes he was surprised and continues to be because he does not think of himself as brave. He is just doing what he believes is right and needs to be done.”
Last Thursday in his remarks at the PEN America awards ceremony at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Roth said, “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.”
“[N]ot everyone has the same opportunity to speak out,” Roth acknowledges. “If you’re an immigrant or a trans person, the price for doing so can be very high. But the best way to find allies is by speaking out, and I have been heartened by the connections I’ve made with other people who value the freedoms we have as Americans. We don’t have to agree on all political topics to defend those freedoms together.”
Recent criticisms of higher education from the Trump administration have not silenced Roth’s voice. He points out that he has long held the belief that the liberal arts encourage critical thought and the “values essential for American’s survival,” as he put it in a 2014 episode of PBS’s “The Open Mind.”
Encouraged by his parents as a student to speak his mind, Roth said, “like many Americans, I believed that in a free country one was able to do this. As a youngster I did get in trouble from time to time for protesting or just making my views known, but I always felt that censorship was counterproductive.”
“Working in a complex organization like a university can be challenging, but I have a very supportive board of trustees at Wesleyan who are proud of the work we do. Of course, I sometimes have my differences with various students and colleagues. But by speaking freely, we have an opportunity to learn from our differences,” said Roth.
The 2025 PEN America awards ceremony upholding freedom of expression also honored actress Sarah Jessica Parker with the PEN/Audible Literary Service Award and Macmillan Publishers CEO Jon Yaged with the Business Visionary Award.
