The Future of Higher Education. A Farewell to Yehuda Elkana.

On June 15th, 2009, CEU hosted a symposium entitled "Changing Conceptions of Knowledge and Knowing: Implications for the Future of Higher Education" as part of the farewell event honoring CEU's retiring Rector and President, Yehuda Elkana.

After a warm welcome from the Chair of the Board of Trustees, Leon Botstein, and the screening of a special, pre-recorded message from HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal, Lee S. Shulman invited the participants to take a stand on the questions of how conceptions of knowledge have changed in recent years and how these changes (may) affect higher education.

Catherine R. Stimpson of New York University kicked-off the first panel with her hopeful vision for the future of the Humanities. In order to elucidate this vision, she reflected on the crisis of the Humanities disciplines by drawing on current events: the recent political protests surrounding Sarkozy's controversial statement about the uselessness of the widely-taught 17th-century novel, La Princesse de Clèves. These protests, Stimpson suggested, reveal the French public's resistance to what it perceives as the official power's attack on the humanities.

Such an attack comes as no surprise, she argued, considering the apocalyptic rhetoric now rampant within the humanistic disciplines themselves. Though Stimpson conceded that there are some truths in the apocalyptic fears voiced by the two horsemen of the humanistic apocalypse - the hard sciences and the changes that took place in the Humanities disciplines in the 60's - she nevertheless believes in the creative ferment of the field. Reflecting on this potential for creativity, she imagined the future of the Humanities as centered around the following questions:

- Who will engage in the Humanities?

- What are the future questions of the Humanities?

- What does a human being look like in the future?

- What should be the new name of the Humanities?

With these questions in mind, Helga Nowotny, Professor Emeritus of ETH Zurich in Social Studies of Science and Vice-President of the European Research Council, took up the topic of recent changes in the field of life sciences. She argued that one of the greatest obstacles that has to be overcome by life sciences is the challenge of organizing and making sense of the overwhelming amount of data that has recently become available (e.g. through the genome project). Nowotny then went on to outline 3 main trends in the field of life sciences:

- Mathematization, which she roughly defined as a tendency towards more abstract descriptions of complexity;

- Standardization, or the movement of life sciences towards a methodology used in engineering, which takes into consideration society's needs;

- Co-production and co-evolution of the social and natural order, as exemplified by concerns surrounding climate change, which is recognized as both a natural and a social phenomenon.

Yaron Ezrahi, an Israeli political scientist, was the next speaker to take the podium. After voicing his disappointment with the progress of the Social Sciences disciplines in recent years, he expressed hopes of seeing more cooperation between the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Ezrahi suggested that Social Sciences should concern themselves not only with theoretical issues of how to become more "reflexive about their own reflexivity", but also with more practical considerations of how to enable individuals to make valuable contributions to society. As a subset of the latter concern, he raised the question of how to cultivate an ability in the students of Social Sciences to make good judgments when it comes to public affairs. According to Ezrahi, the answers to these questions, at least in part, lie in an education that prepares students to live with ambiguities and uncertainties, which open them up to dialogue. Compromise, he suggested, should be viewed as a principle in itself, rather than a betrayal of principles.

The final speaker of this panel was Leon Botstein, who took up some difficulties currently facing the Arts disciplines. Among his primary worries was the isolation of the Arts, which have both theoretical (art theory) and practical (studio art) components, from the university structure. Other concerns included the role of art in human communities, its function with respect to normative claims, and its connection to other human activity, such as science, aesthetics, etc.

In order to provide some closure to the first part of the symposium, the two designated panel respondents, William M. Sullivan and Maher Z. Hashweh summarized the main ideas that resonated with all the speakers: collective responsibility, critical approach, ability to assume multiple points of view, social implications of knowledge, challenges to democracy - are a few examples of the overlap between the talks.

Following the second panel, which dealt with practical applications of the concerns voiced above to a university context, CEU's outgoing President and Rector was given a chance to respond to the presentations made by his colleagues and friends. Elkana suggested that the visions for the future of higher education presented above could benefit from contextualization, which he found missing in most of the talks. He also stressed that improvement in higher education is grounded in the cultivation of intellectual and personal respect.