A webinar with Students Coalition Berlin
In recent decades, universities have witnessed bitter conflicts about matters such as social injustice, racism, misogyny, police violence, AI, environmental degradation and war. The disputes have prompted many university communities to ask foundational questions: what is permissible speech and should there be campus restrictions on public assembly? Who should decide these rules of conduct and how are universities best governed? What exactly is a university? Do universities have a future?
In this webinar, Professor John Keane will suggest that history really matters when tackling these basic questions. Ignorance of the past blinds us to the novelties of the present and that’s why, Keane will suggest, understanding the history of universities helps us grasp why in our times universities are everywhere facing a new set of contradictory pressures. Universities long ago ceased to be ivory towers, sites for the disinterested pursuit of universal knowledge in which ‘scholars pass judgment on scholars’ (Kant). Pushed and pulled by various forces, they’re becoming multiplex institutions: government-regulated agencies, profit-seeking businesses, and management-controlled bureaucracies. Yet, Keane will suggest, universities still promise something no other institution can provide: free spaces for challenging reigning orthodoxies, nurturing a sense of worldly wonder and promoting public commitments to the improvement of life on our planet. These ideals are currently threatened by pressures from both inside and outside universities and that’s why, Keane will conclude, students, researchers, teachers and administrators at all levels must invent new ways of guaranteeing that universities live up to their claimed opposition to ignorance, prejudice, lies and nonsense and their positive commitments to public truth seeking, freedom and justice.
