The New School for Social Research and its flagship journal, Social Research: An International Quarterly of the Social Sciences, will host the conference “Free Inquiry at Risk: Universities in Dangerous Times” from October 29–30 at The New School.

The conference will open with an event held jointly with The New School President Bob Kerrey in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the University in Exile, an institution created within the larger New School in 1933 to provide a home for scholars rescued from fascist Europe. Ira Katznelson, the former dean of The New School for Social Research and the current Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University, will present a lecture in honor of the school’s legacy as an institution dedicated to academic freedom and providing a home for persecuted scholars from around the world.

This founding moment serves as a springboard to discuss the core values of academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and free inquiry in the life of the university under conditions of national and international duress. The conference will feature panel discussions with prominent scholars and experts to discuss the impact of rapid globalization, changes in the geo-political arena, modes of financing, the extension of higher education franchises, the rise of collateral institutes and research centers, the relationship between specialization and integration, and regime change on academic freedom and free inquiry.

Panel discussions include an up-close look at current hot-spots of intellectual attack across the globe with endangered scholars from Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Belarus, and China, in discussion with Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Institute and a roundtable with university presidents present and past from the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Amherst College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and The New School.  To view the conference agenda and speakers, visit the Social Research website.

The conference is the 18th in a series organized by The New School for Social Research’s award-winning journal Social Research. This conference is made possible with generous support from the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts.