Editor’s Introduction

Arien Mack Editor’s Introduction TH IS ISSU E 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 inl934. 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 analy­ sis of the centrality of the core values of academic freedom, institu­ tional 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 econo­ mies 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 inte­ gration, as well as other questions, are affecting the core values and the character of the university. The New School’s first founding moment came about as a result of the perceived threat to national security engendered by the First World War, which led Nicholas Murray Butler, then president of Columbia Editor’s Introduction xi University, to impose the signing of mandatory loyalty oaths on the faculty. This led in turn to the firing of some key faculty who opposed the draft and to the resignation of others who went on to establish the New School for Social Research in 1919 as a place dedicated to an educated citizenry where free inquiry and academic freedom were guaranteed. The second founding occurred in 1933, another politically charged moment, in response to the rise of Nazism and the collapse of parliamentary democracies in Europe. The University in Exile was established as a haven for largely German Jewish scholars who were rescued by the New School’s first president, Alvin Johnson. Not only was this institution within the New School a safe haven for the rescued scholars, it was also dedicated to the principles of free inquiry, faculty autonomy, and academic freedom. In 1934, when the University in Exile became the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, our journal, Social Research, was born. It became and continues to be the public voice of the New School. Had academic freedom and free inquiry only been issues that loomed large in the past and were fully safeguarded in the present, the conference and this subsequent issue of the journal might only have been of historical interest. Unfortunately, while the nature of the threats to academic freedom and the freedom of inquiry may change they nevertheless persist, and it is these present threats that were the subject of the conference and are the subject of this issue. A great deal has been written about the changing nature of universities in the context o f the needs of the knowledge economy, rapid globalization, the entrenchm ent of neoliberal economics, and significant changes in the geopolitical arena. There is a widespread perception that, due to varying kinds of pressures, both internal and external, ongoing seminal shifts are occurring in the ways in which universities function: in how they relate to society and to the state, in their increasingly complex relationships with industry, in their explod­ ing size. There are many representations of these shifts and so there are a number of lenses that may be used to investigate them. One, and the xii social research one we used, is to explore whether these pressures are forcing changes in the core values—specifically academic freedom and free inquiry— that long have underpinned the academic enterprise. While these shifts look very different in their...