The Peregrine Collective convened an intimate gathering of deans, professors, and scholars who discussed the question of what the purpose of the university should be and explore the university’s evolving role in society and the tradeoffs among its competing aims.
Keynote speakers included John Tomasi, president of Heterodox Academy, Lucas Morel, professor of politics at Washington and Lee University, and Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, visiting professor in philosophy at UC Berkeley.
The program began with a Friday evening cocktail reception, followed by a keynote by Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas, who provided an outline of the distinct English, German, and American models of the university and argued for the importance of individual formation, even at research universities. The colleagues enjoyed a three course dinner with lively discussion.
The conference continued Saturday with a keynote by Lucas Morel, who described the thought of Frederick Douglass, how the right to speech and education were critical to emancipation to Douglass, and how the right to speech is synonymous with the right to be heard. He used the lessons from Douglass to inform how we should view robust protections of speech at universities as a critical tool for the mission of the university.
Three facilitated discussions followed, which were informed by pre-circulated readings, including works by Clark Kerr, Thomas Kuhn, John Henry Newman, Jonathan Rauch, and Josef Pieper.
Individual Aims – Colleagues discussed whether a university must have a single animating principle, whether belief in objective truth is key to the university’s mission, comparisons of the aims of liberal arts universities vs. research universities, and tensions between the need to enforce time, manner, and place restrictions and seeing the university as a special place to nurture students and advance restorative justice.
Collective Aims – Colleagues discussed how ideological conformity in university leadership is propagated, the factors behind stagnating fields and less disruptive research, the utility (or lack therof) of the “marketplace of ideas” analogy, the importance of the Christian roots of the university in shaping institutional structures, and the role of prestige in incentivizing people to advance the mission of the university.
Solutions to Increase Viewpoint Diversity at Universities – To begin the discussion, John Tomasi read a draft of a piece he was working on and the group discussed how to reconcile competing aims in order to facilitate viewpoint diversity. Tensions between endogenous and exogenous change were explored and innovative institutional structures were proposed.
This initiative was generously sponsored by the Academic Freedom Alliance, Heterodox Academy, and the Zephyr Institute.
