Composite Calendar
Professor Peter Fitzpatrick: IAS Visiting Fellow
The seeming paradox of the university lies in its strength being its weakness. With its commitment to illimitable enquiry, its opposition to any constraining determinacy, the university embodies that responsive regard to what can be otherwise integral to modern political formation. That is the university’s strength. Yet its constituent openness to what can be otherwise denies the university any present determinate force of its own. Its resulting dependence on a determinate and protective force apart from itself is the university’s weakness. It is, of course, obvious by now that the university is being undermined through this vulnerability. This is not so much because of explicit dictates limiting its freedom. It is more a matter of the intrusive and corrosive demands of disciplinary society.
This lecture seeks in the activities of the university, especially in the Humanities, a clearer resolution of both its elusive strength and of its essential role in the incomplete project of modern political formation.umanitiesHH