Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist's Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on

From the president of Wesleyan University, a compassionate and provocative manifesto on the crises confronting higher education

In this bracing book, Michael S. Roth stakes out a pragmatist path through the thicket of issues facing colleges today to carry out the mission of higher education. With great empathy, candor, subtlety, and insight, Roth offers a sane approach to the noisy debates surrounding affirmative action, political correctness, and free speech, urging us to envision college as a space in which students are empowered to engage with criticism and with a variety of ideas.
 
Countering the increasing cynical dismissal—from both liberals and conservatives—of the traditional core values of higher education, this book champions the merits of different diversities, including intellectual diversity, with a timely call for universities to embrace boldness, rigor, and practical idealism.

• The Assault on American Excellence
• The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us
• The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
• The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students
• Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education
• Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil
• The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
• Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters
• What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth, and Equality on Campus
• The Case Against Free Speech: The First Amendment, Fascism, and the Future of Dissent