Free Inquiry at Risk: Universities in Dangerous Times, Part I
Volume 76, Number 2 (Summer 2009)

Editor's Introduction

This issue contains the papers from our nineteenth Social Research conference, which celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the University in Exile at the New School. The topic of the conference, academic freedom and free inquiry, was chosen for its resonance with both the original founding of the New School in 1919 and the subsequent founding of the University in Exile in 1934. Both of these events were responses to serious constraints on academic freedom— the first at Columbia University, the second in Nazi Germany— and both are elegantly discussed in the first paper in the issue by Ira Katznelson, which was also the opening address at the conference.

These two founding moments serve as the platform for an analysis of the centrality of the core values of academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and free inquiry to the research university and for an exploration into the threats to these values that are emerging today in our globalized society—a society characterized by advanced economies that generate wealth through knowledge and information. In this context, the issue explores questions about how the financing of universities, the widespread extension of higher education franchises in an era of mass higher education, changes in the structure of the university, the rise of collateral institutes and research centers (that is, of para-universities), the relationship between specialization and integration, as well as other questions, are affecting the core values and the character of the university....

—Arien Mack

Table of Contents