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The New School’s Social Research Journal
Announces Major Conference Investigating
Academic and Intellectual Freedom Across the Globe

“Free Inquiry at Risk: Universities in Dangerous Times," October 29 – 31

Conference Commemorates the 75th Anniversary of
The New School’s ‘University in Exile’

New York, October 6, 2008— 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 commemorate the 75th anniversary 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. 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.

“This conference brings together the many shareholders in higher education to help us collaboratively defend and support the myriad devastating challenges to academic freedom,” said Arien Mack, editor of Social Research and the Alfred and Monette Marrow Professor of Psychology at The New School for Social Research. “By proactively exploring the pressures challenging our core value of free inquiry, we can ensure collaborative efforts to ensure the traditions that have allowed intellectual freedom to flourish.”

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.

The opening of the conference will be held jointly with The New School's campus celebration of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the University of Exile, to be attended by The New School President, Bob Kerrey. The event will honor the school’s legacy as an institution dedicated to academic freedom and providing a home for persecuted scholars from around the world with a speech by 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.

“Today, The New School still proudly upholds the values of academic freedom and social justice that inspired the creation of the University in Exile,” said university President Bob Kerrey. “We continue to occupy the front lines of support for oppressed scholars in other countries – a focus reflected in our successful efforts this year to bring two endangered scholars and their families from Ethiopia and Iraq to the university. We are proud to celebrate this anniversary as an opportunity to reaffirm our history as a haven for persecuted intellectuals and to uphold our commitment to these values everyday both among our students and in our curriculum.”

The University in Exile was created in 1933 by New School President Alvin Johnson to provide a haven for scholars and artists whose lives were threatened in fascist Europe. Johnson's rescue effort throughout the 1930s and forties would eventually bring over 180 intellectual refugees to The New School, including highly regarded scholars such as Karl Brandt, Gerhard Colm, Max Wertheimer, Hans Speier, Wolfgang Kohler, Rudolf Arnheim, Wilhelm Reich, Adolph Lowe, Alfred Schütz, and Leo Strauss.

On Thursday, October 30, the conference will explore the origins and role of the research university and how the tradition of free inquiry has fared under conditions of duress, including political conflicts experienced by Israel and Palestine and structural transformations seen in the proliferation of American universities overseas.

The conference’s keynote event on the evening of Thursday, October 30 will provide an up-close look at current hot-spots of intellectual attack across the globe. Endangered scholars from Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Belarus, and China, in discussion with Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Institute, will discuss their experiences in their home countries where they faced persecution, prosecution, and imprisonment. Ethiopian economist Befekadu Degefe will join the panel as The New School for Social Research’s newly appointed “Rescued Scholar in Residence,” a position created to continue the school’s legacy as the University in Exile. Considered a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, Mr. Degefe was released from an Ethiopian prison in July 2007, after being incarcerated for more than a year for peacefully protesting alleged election rigging in 2005.

Events for Friday, October 31 will explore the effect of government on academic freedom through the examples of South Africa, China, India, Russia and the Post-Soviet States and host 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 in a discussion of the future of their school’s traditions. To view the conference agenda and speakers, visit http://www.socres.org/FreeInquiry/agenda.htm.

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.

About Social Research, An International Quarterly of the Social Sciences – An award-winning journal, Social Research has been mapping the landscape of intellectual thought since 1934. Most issues are theme-driven, combining historical analysis, theoretical explanation, and reportage in rigorous and engaging discussion by some of the world’s leading scholars and thinkers. Articles cover various fields of the social sciences and the humanities and thus promote the interdisciplinary aims that have characterized The New School for Social Research since its inception. Recent issues have focused on such themes as "Martyrdom, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Denial,” “Collective Memory and Collective Identity,” and “Difficult Choices.” The Social Research conference series was launched in 1988. The conferences aim to enhance public understanding of critical and contested issues by exploring them in broad historical and cultural contexts. For more information, visit www.socres.org.

About The New School – Located in the heart of New York’s Greenwich Village, The New School is a center of academic excellence where intellectual and artistic freedoms thrive. The 10,200 matriculated students and more than 6,400 continuing education students come from around the world to participate in a wide range of undergraduate to doctoral programs in art and design, the social sciences, management and urban policy, the humanities and the performing arts. When The New School was founded in 1919, its mission was to create a place where global peace and justice were more than theoretical ideals. Today, The New School continues that mission, with programs that strive to foster engaged world citizenship. For more information, visit www.newschool.edu.

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