This project aims to contribute to the future of universities by revisiting and updating their uniquely important mission and responsibilities. Universities have always been tightly bound up with values. Epistemic values in particular – values having to do with knowledge, truth, understanding, wisdom, and intellectual excellence and virtuousness – are distinctive of and crucial to the idea of a university as a center of teaching, research, and scholarship. Values ground responsibilities. The epistemic values that are central to the idea of a university thus ground the epistemic responsibilities of the university. This project seeks to investigate, defend, and reinvigorate the epistemic responsibilities of the university, and to engage and influence policy makers and opinion leaders in their views on the primary epistemic responsibilities of the university. Its central question is:
What are the epistemic values that the modern university ought to uphold, what responsibilities flow from these, and how can it meet these responsibilities in the face of contemporary challenges?
Contact: Rik Peels, Jeroen de Ridder, René van Woudenberg
Funding
Funded by: John Templeton Foundation
Budget: EUR 1.299.130