Fritz Stern's laudatory remarks on the occasion of the awarding of an honorary degree to German Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel by The New School. Stern's remarks were delivered half in English and half in German; his remarks in German have here been translated in to English.

German Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel's remarks at the American Academy in Berlin, February 19, 2009, on the occasion of her acceptance of an honorary degree from The New School.

Benjamin Lee introduces Section II: The Future of Universities and the Fate of Free Inquiry and Academic Freedom. He explores the state of academic freedom and the effects of the present financial crises and posits an alternative to the classical liberal arts model.

This paper suggests that the time for free inquiry and academic freedom at European universities has rarely been better than at present, that debates and results arising from independent scientific discourse have rarely had better chances of blossoming and evoking a response than in the time in which we now live, and that the basic rules of university and scholarly work in general are, by no means, seriously threatened in Europe, in comparison to many other regions of the world. What I see is that universities now, more than ever, have the chance and the obligation to discharge their duties at the centre of society. Universities are needed and respected - and with them the principles of the university that this paper describes and elaborates. These principles are recognized by society as a whole as the prerequisites for a successful response. This is the age of the universities - now, more than ever.

Through an extended discussion of the German higher education system in comparison with other European countries and the US, this paper suggests that academic freedom is not simply a consequence of institutional arrangements. It is a consequence of looking at what one is doing, at one's own professional responsibility. Academic freedom must be sustained and protected not only by the state or institutional arrangements of universities, but must also be protected by every academician. If professors do not resist intrusion on their freedom in either collective or individual ways, academic freedom is in danger. If, for example, a faculty of medicine were to allow conflicts of interest to develop between the freedom of research and the commercial interest of cooperating enterprises, if it does not collectively sense that there may be an intrusion on academic freedom resulting from the influence on their research from pharmaceutical corporations, for example, academic freedom will be in endangered from within the university. In a society where professors act this way, simply granting academic freedom may be a fine thing, but it does not really fulfill freedom's promise.

This paper focuses our attention on a few principles that guide great universities. I want to suggest that the United States has not distinguished itself particularly well in preventing episodes of repression and attempts to silence dissent at universities, nor has it produced an extraordinary number of courageous leaders over the past seventy-five years who have come forward to defend the principles of academic freedom. While the US has never reached the level of repression that Germany felt in the 1930s, nor that which was felt by Soviet geneticists at roughly the same time during the Lysenko years, we have nonetheless done significant damage to our system of higher learning because we have failed to understand fully the role that academic freedom and free inquiry play in creating the knowledge that societies depend on for their social and economic, as well as humanistic, progress.

Free and open inquiry is a human condition—it is established, maintained, and protected by humans. It is not a natural force that we can harness, nor a natural right that we inherit, nor is it a natural resource that we can mine. I believe that free inquiry is essential to the development of mankind, and I also believe academic freedom and the protection of academic freedom are essential. This paper elaborates upon these thoughts and outlines some of the risks to free inquiry.

This article discusses the challenges of educational transformation in post-totalitarian societies. Special attention is given to the situation in social sciences and humanities which have suffered a long period of the Soviet ideology domination. The dramatic story of the European Humanities University, which was established in Minsk in 1992 and closed down by the Belarusian regime in 2004, serves as a perfect example of the difficulties in overcoming the crisis of humanities education. The importance of the crucial differentiation between knowledge and thinking is emphasized.

Hans-Peter Krueger introduces Session III: Universities Under Conditions of Duress. After outlining four points of the first session, he posits two personal lessons learned as an East German intellectual - the function of a prior primacy of economy in the Western world and the continuity of bureaucratic increase. He finishes with a commentary on the Bologna process.

This paper first traces the historical activity of the Hebrew University of Jerusalam and academic life in Israel. It then goes on to discuss pluralism and showhow the current financial and economic crisis may present us with an opportunity for academic renewal.

Suppose we thought of free inquiry as a social matter, a public good. We might ask not only whether individual scholars are free from illegitimate, especially external, censorship or attempts to control their work. We might ask also how much the university as an institution contributes to overall freedom of inquiry. To answer the second question would require assessing (among other things) how well universities educate students to be participants in free inquiry, how well researchers communicate their work to raise the quality of public discourse, and whether the results of scientific inquiry are made freely available to advance further inquiry or controlled as private property. It would require asking whether the specific structures and practices through which we organize academic work - from disciplinary departments to evaluation procedures to publication systems - do more to facilitate or obstruct free inquiry. This article will fall short of answering all these questions, but I hope it will put them on the agenda. I present them in the context of two successive transformations - the late 19th century reorganization of universities by disciplines devoted to the production of new knowledge and the dramatic 20th increase in scale and cost which challenged the internal integration of universities. These shifted the constraints and conditions under which students and faculty could take up the project of free inquiry. Appreciating the impact of these transformations is also basic to projects of renewing the university and free inquiry today.

I would like to argue that to a large extent universities are themselves to blame for their failure to respond adequately to external pressures of the day. Barring the work of a few exceptional departments and individuals here and there, universities are incapable of addressing precisely those problems that most preoccupy our societies nowadays. Granted, universities rightly regard themselves as playing a key role in preserving intellectual, academic and cultural traditions. This, however, should not be taken to be an acceptable excuse for not dealing with fundamental social injustices and discrepancies - problems often deemed to lie outside the scope of a university's legitimate interests. Since universities are by far the most important institutions in any modern society entrusted with the task of creating knowledge (whether the exclusivity of this knowledge-creating role is a good thing is another question), they should also strive to apply the knowledge created there to major social issues at any given time. This paper substantiates this thesis through some examples, and discusses its bearing on the future of the university curriculum.

This paper begins with some brief reflections on the 19th century apprehensions of Tocqueville and Mill and their relevance to ourselves, and goes on to ask for what and for whom universities exist. There is no incontrovertible answer, but one can distinguish two ideal types of a modern university, as I do. I praise one of them, without being dismissive of the others, and pose some problems about their institutionalization, and raise some old questions about the rights of citizens and the privileges of guilds. I finally discuss the threats to free inquiry posed by well-intentioned governments in a British - rather than an American or European - context, recurring to themes from Tocqueville and Mill.

I am afraid all that can be said of Karl Marx has already been written. What I can add to this great body of literature is the specific vantage point from which I view Marx's work. What I shall convey is not some collective statement of the East European intelligentsia, but my individual story. But I should add that my own story is typical in many respects. Many phases of my life, if not the whole of it, could stand for similar phases in the lives of others. I hope this will apply when I relate what my ideas in relation to Marx were at various stages in my individual life (and of history, by which my life was deeply affected.)