Michael S. Roth on elitism and education

We will always have elites — some deserving, some not — and we will always have anti-elitists — some civic-minded, some cynical. Constitutional democracy doesn’t work if people are stuck in the station they’re born into, and education can still be an effective lubricant, and a powerful corrective to entrenched inequality.

Like the founders, we can be anti-elitists without falling into the trap of being anti-education. We’ll have to create pathways that change the opportunity structures for our fellow citizens, wherever they live and wherever, or whether, their parents went to school.

--Michael S. Roth, President of Wesleyan University