Increasing pressures from outside and even within universities themselves are reshaping their traditional character of universities and may even be threatening its most highly cherished core values: free inquiry and academic freedom. Please join our distinguished speakers in exploring how these various pressures, including rapid globalization, higher education franchises, the rise of collateral institutes and research centers, corporate connections, changing sources of funding, exponential growth in the number of students, and many other stressors are transforming universities and even may be threatening their core values both in the US and in other countries.

This is the 18th in the Social Research conference series and is one in a series of events commemorating the 75th anniversary of The New School’s University in Exile. Created by The New School’s first president, Alvin Johnson, as a haven for scholars rescued from Nazi Europe, the University in Exile embodied the ideals of free inquiry and academic freedom. In 1934, the University in Exile was renamed the Graduate Faculty of The New School for Social Research and founded Social Research.

Join distinguished scholars and intellectuals in exploring the nature and future of religion, spirituality, and secularism in the United States, looking at their changing relations both historically and through contemporary debates.

This will be the 19th Social Research conference series and is motivated by the conflicts arising from the tension between religion and secularity - - conflicts that are enduring and, as the daily headlines attest, increasingly fierce and widespread. Within the US, these tensions simmer in debates over the nature of our constitutional separation of “church” and “state,” with daily challenges to the long-standing belief that democracy requires the church to be rigorously separated from the state, or that religious discourse must be kept distinct from political decision-making.

These debates span all three branches of government and permeate civil society and the media and even our homes, where families must wrestle with decisions about how to educate children, what sort of health care alternatives are acceptable, not to mention whom they will vote for in the next presidential election. To address these questions, the conference brings together more than 30 theologians, historians, legal scholars, sociologists, and anthropologists in conversation with each other and the public. We are pleased to announce that Charles Taylor will be giving the conference keynote address.