Dear Colleagues,
At the ISA 2008 Annual Convention, we put together a panel titled "The Crisis of the University in Late Modern Times", which was very well received by a full-house audience. We were delighted to see how so many scholars working in various subjects were interested in this topic. Based on this successful experience and comments we got from this year's panel, we are thinking about organizing a panel for next
year's ISA convention at New York City February 15-18, 2009. If you are interested we need to get your abstract along with your contact information by May 14, in order to be able to submit it to ISA by May 15th. Do let us know whether you would be willing to do a round table panel on this topic as well.
The Crisis of the Academia in Modernity
The soundings of crisis in the worldwide institution of the university are today everywhere to be heard. As the institutional space of the university is penetrated by market forces, ideological contests, class and factional interests, and sovereign pronouncements of the necessities of security and war, the relative autonomy of this space seems more and more a nostalgic remembrance, less and less a contemporary reality. The Kantian architecture of the university might once have been everywhere celebrated and near-universally replicated, where the faculty of philosophy convenes the tribunal of reason and passes judgment upon all other faculties.
When today it is said that the university is in crisis, this is the architecture that is said to be threatened: within the university, the centrality and regulative force of the tribunal of reason—and, with it, the authority of the lower faculties and their capacities to justify the thinking and teaching they do—is itself in doubt and on trial. And when today the call goes out to resist those forces penetrating the university, imperiling its relative autonomy, and depriving it of its capacities to function as a site of critical reflection on society, this is the architecture whose restoration is called for.
This panel proposes to question such interpretations of the university and its relation to society and the political.
Sincerely,
Richard K. Ashley
Arizona State University
Halit Mustafa Tagma
Arizona State University
Please send paper abstracts and discussant proposals to
halit.tagma@ asu.edu by May 14.
For more information on the convention visit:
http://www.isanet. org/newyork2009/
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