2024 Graham Circle Annual Gathering
Join us on Thursday, April 25th, at 5:30PM for our annual gathering celebrating the Graham Circle and its members.
About the Event
Join us on Thursday, April 25th, at 5:30 p.m. for our 2024 gathering of the Graham Circle. Graham Circle members will receive an exclusive invitation to register for this event by email in the coming weeks. If you are interested in becoming a Circle member, click here.
This year’s gathering will be hosted by Circle member and Basic Program Alum Roberta Lee. The gathering will feature food, merriment, and mingling, as well as a conversation between Dean Seth Green and Michael S. Roth, one of the country’s foremost thinkers and leaders for liberal education.
For further questions about this event, please contact Iris Clever at clever@uchicago.edu.
Roth, an award-winning historian who currently serves as President of Wesleyan University, will share insights from his book The Student (2023) and Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (2015) alongside engaging your questions and comments.
Who's Speaking
Michael S. Roth
Historian, Award-Winning Author, and University President
Michael S. Roth '78 became the 16th president of Wesleyan University in 2007. He has overseen the launch of academic programs at Wesleyan such as the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life and the Shapiro Center for Writing, as well as five new interdisciplinary colleges emphasizing research and cohort building in the areas of the environment, film, East Asian studies, integrative sciences, and design and engineering. Under his leadership, Wesleyan had its most ambitious fundraising campaign in its history, raising more than $482 million, primarily for financial aid. Roth has undertaken a number of initiatives that have made a Wesleyan education more affordable for many and more accessible to students from under-represented groups.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision in July 2023, he announced a suite of new recruiting efforts aimed at enhancing diverse campus learning including an end to admissions preference for legacy applicants and the creation of an African Scholars Program. An intellectual historian, Roth has published several books centered on how people make sense of the past. Since returning to Wesleyan, he has published three books (all with Yale University Press) bearing on liberal education, the most recent being The Student, A Short History (2023). His. Roth’s 2019 book, Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness, addresses some of the most contentious issues in American higher education, including affirmative action, safe spaces, and questions of free speech. Roth continues to teach undergraduate courses and at Wesleyan and online.