[Introduction]
Through the production of basic knowledge in virtually every field and its application to the betterment of lives around the world, the North American research university has professed—especially over the past half century—a privileged location in that world. Not only has the university claimed a unique position in the transfer of learning across generations, but it has also sought to overcome national boundaries and the limitations of its own national or regional formation through the international exchange of learning and through the articulation of universal values.
Yet here lies the essential challenge for the North American research university: how to be both of and in the world, pressing universal values and underlining the indivisible and transcendent nature of knowledge while irrevocably located within the histories, constituencies, and demands of the nation. For some, this challenge may be but a pause in the globalization of institutions of research and learning around the world; for others, the challenge represents an essential contradiction within the very nature of the North American research university's project in the broader world. The challenge, simply put, is the following: should the university transcend its national foundations as it engages the broader world? Can it?
This discussion is especially important, and especially difficult, in the period following the attacks of September 11, 2001.Page 2 The intensified culture of belligerence and the narrowing of national interest mobilized in the wake of the attacks seemed an instant threat to the cultures of conversation and collaboration that marked the North American university's engagement with the world throughout the 1990s. Suddenly, the institutional ground of international conversations and collaborations seemed a fragile and critical and much threatened "sacred space," while the knowledge produced—much of which articulated universal values and addressed global needs—could appear "heretical". In the generation of this volume's project, the motifs of "sacred space" and "heretical knowledge" have marked not only the risks of worldly engagement in an era of extreme national belligerence but also the conceits that have long inhabited the claims to universals in the research university's productions, transferals, and applications of learning.
We are writing in critical times. We can ask whether, in these last few years, the research university's privileged position has been unmade, or inhibited, or lost. We should ask whether, in these times, the North American research university can sustain a unified ethic of responsibility in its address to the world, an ethic built around universal values while attentive to the complex unfoldings of global publics. We must ask whether the university can provide the support and ensure the freedom that will enable its members and supporters to generate and pursue questions critical to understanding the world, to produce the knowledge vital to human betterment and global security, and to respect the productivity of heresies in the transcendence of convenient positions and national ideologies.
This volume, and the seminar which gave rise to it, developed around a position paper completed in April 2002. Canning, Cohen and Kennedy wrote that paper in order to stimulate reflection on the possibility of an international address for the North American university that could sustain its highest ideals in an era of belligerence and uncertainty charged by the events of 9/11/2001 and the political responses that followed.
While animated by the uncertainties produced by the attacks of September 11, 2001 and their aftermath, the position paper's concerns for the university's open inquiry and reasoned engagement, intellectual rigor, and responsibility to the world beyond the university itself have not declined in significance over the last several years. In many ways, especially in the contentious justification of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and with the failures in the application of knowledgePage 3 and intelligence and the tragedies of occupation that have followed, we have found even greater reason to be concerned about the fates of intellectual and institutional responsibility within this era of extreme belligerence.