A Discussion Series Hosted by the LMU University Executive Board

Six Conversations · Three Semesters

How Does a University Address Difficult Questions?

The contentious issues facing society—from antisemitism and extremism to animal experimentation, dual-use research, artificial intelligence, and surveillance—also find their way into universities, where they become subjects of debate and conflict.

The University and the Difficult Questions, a discussion series curated by the LMU University Executive Board, explores how universities engage with such issues—not only from scholarly and academic perspectives, but also in the tensions of the conflicts themselves.

In doing so, LMU also seeks to address a broader question: What contribution can a university make to pluralistic and civil discourse in a democratic public sphere?

Prof. Dr. Armin Nassehi in an interview about the discussion series (in German)
Moderator of the entire series: Dr. Marie Schoeß, Advisor to the LMU Vice President for Law, Economics, and Social Sciences
Venue: Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW), Plenary Hall
Language: German

First Conversation: How Political Can a University Be?

The question guiding this evening is deliberately not how political science and scholarship should or may be. That would be an epistemological question, one that can ultimately be addressed only in abstract terms. Instead, the question is explicitly institutional: How political can a university be?

Max Weber’s famous principle of value neutrality therefore raises more than questions concerning the philosophy of science. It also draws attention to the extent to which the production of scientific knowledge has always taken place within a social and institutional framework.

The setting in which these tensions are negotiated is academia: the university as an actual, historically situated institution. Academic life has always had a political dimension, even as scientific inquiry is expected to be guided solely by criteria of truth—criteria that are themselves historically situated.

Rather than approaching these issues in purely abstract terms, the discussion will examine them concretely from the perspective of LMU. By the end of the evening, the central question posed in the title is unlikely to have received a definitive answer. That, indeed, is inherent in the nature of the question itself.

Panelists

Prof. Armin Nassehi
Vice President for Law, Economics and Social Sciences and Deputy to the LMU President (introduction to the series and opening remarks)

Prof. Matthias H. Tschöp
President of LMU

Prof. Monika Schnitzer
Chair of Comparative Economics

Prof. Sophia Charlotte Volk
Professor of Communication Studies, specializing in Strategic Communication