Michael S. Roth '78 is president of Wesleyan University. He continues to teach undergraduate courses and through Coursera has offered MOOCs, the most recent being “How to Change the World.”

Author and curator (most notably of the exhibition “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture,” which opened at the Library of Congress in 1998), Roth describes his scholarly interests as centered on “how people make sense of the past.” His fifth book, Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living with the Past was published in 2012. His most recent book, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, (2014) won the Frederic W. Ness Book Award given annually by the Association of American Colleges & Universities to the book that best illuminates the goals and practices of a contemporary liberal education.

He regularly publishes essays, book reviews, and commentaries in the national media and scholarly journals.