First Conversation: How Political Can a University Be?

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

Prof. Dr. Matthias H. Tschöp
President of LMU

Prof. Dr. Monika Schnitzer
Chair of Comparative Economics

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