The 2024 Terry Forum: The Place of the Liberal Arts in a Changing Climate
Wednesday, February 14, 2024
4:00-6:00 p.m., reception to follow
Kline Tower - 14th Floor
Panelists:
Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
Hi’ilei Hobart, Yale University
Gregory Marks, Hostos CUNY
Stephanie Pfirman, Arizona State University
J. T. Roane, Rutgers University
Moderators:
Ana Keilson, Gull Island Institute
Justin Reynolds, Gull Island Institute
Recent years have seen a proliferation of new courses and majors addressing climate issues as well as overdue reckonings with the university’s implication in practices and legacies of extraction. This Forum aims at a more fundamental reappraisal of the enterprise of the liberal arts. If the liberal arts have traditionally been conceived as preparation for civic life, how should this enterprise respond to the multi-scale reconfigurations of civic life associated with climate change and to new ideas about the appropriate place of human beings within the biophysical order? How might the interlocking ethical, political, and epistemological challenges arising from climate change help to sharpen articulations of the aims—and limitations—of the liberal arts enterprise? What responsibilities do universities have to the places and ecologies they occupy? What might it mean for liberal arts educators and students to inhabit these places well?
View a recording of the the forum.