Liberal Arts Education: Freedom of Memory and the Memory of Freedom

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The panel will explore the push for increased academic freedom and the challenges to it that were initiated in Eastern Europe and Eurasia in the 1990s. The experiments in liberal arts and sciences education across the region were part of the more general processes of liberalization and democratization. This is also why they have been experiencing a pushback from the more conservative forces, both in the academic and political sense. The panel will explore the emergence of institutions like Smolny College, European Humanities University, and the American University of Central Asia, interrogate what they meant for the understanding of higher education and academic freedom (not simply for the faculty but also for the students), and interrogate how their challenges to the understanding of the past impacted the present. It will focus on the current meaning of liberal arts education in a society that is changing in its structure. We will also discuss the threats that the liberal education poses to socio-political authoritarianism, and authoritarianism, for liberal education.

Sub Unit

• Sociology, Public Health, Education

Chair

• Jonathan Becker, Bard College

Papers

• Liberal Arts and Academic Freedom in Times of Political Uncertainty: The AUCA Experience - Saniia Toktogazieva, American U of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan)

• EHU as a Unique Phenomenon in the Field of Humanities Education - Mariia Laktionkina, European Humanities University (Lithuania)

• Liberal Arts Education and Academic Freedom: Between Ideal and Vulnerability - Filipp Fedchin, Bard College Berlin (Germany)

• Liberal Arts in a Changing World - Artemy Magun, Inst for Global Reconstitution

Discussant

• Kerry Bystrom, Bard College Berlin (Germany)