For proponents of social justice, environmental well-being and ethical action (speaking very broadly), the political turn in the US is catastrophic.  Its repercussions will be felt throughout the world in frighteningly real terms.

Those repercussions will of course be felt in the academy, which was struggling well before this debacle.  Over the past two years in the US, it has become clear that academic freedom is a conditional concept, even a fiction in some quarters.  Censorship can only grow in the coming years because the financial and administrative structures of contemporary higher education have created grave vulnerabilities. Scientific fields are no less exposed than those of the social sciences and humanities as academic authority falters.

For decades before this recent, ugly turn, the conditions in higher education have worsened–in North America and throughout much of the West.  Vast numbers of young scholars seeking increasingly elusive roles in higher education have found themselves in a kind of academic proletariat, struggling to maintain commitments in study and research endangered by technicist imperatives and declining institutional support.  It goes without saying that conditions in the arts and humanities have been particularly grim.

New responses of resistance and creative thinking are vital, and these must take multiple forms. The European Graduate School, for its part, has sought to introduce unique structures of flexible study that remain at a very advanced intellectual level while pushing forward in the development of its offerings.  It aims to transform the very notion of “continuing education” by welcoming interested individuals from a broad range of disciplines who seek new inspiration and theoretical insight for cross-disciplinary thought.  At the same time, it remains uncompromising in its devotion to quality in its accredited degree programs, seeking to ensure that student work can achieve proper recognition and fighting to maintain the institutional conditions of healthy and incisive critical thought.  In the latter endeavour, it upholds the core value of academic freedom as a key component of its mission.

This is a time in which we need points of creative and critical relay, oases in the spreading wasteland.  EGS is only one of these.  But we wish to underscore our commitments in these dark times and invite others to join us in the ongoing fight to give a creative and even adventurous turn to critical thought.

Christopher Fynsk

President of the EGS