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Eman Abdelhadi, Robert Vargas, and Gabriel WinantOn University Values II
Wednesday, November 13, 2024, 5:00–6:30pm
Last year, 3CT’s Corporate University project initiated a conversation about the University of Chicago’s commitment to institutional neutrality and freedom of expression. Speakers questioned the affordances and costs of such a stance, as well as what other factors shape our experiences of learning and living together.
Since our most recent event in late April, campus communities here and across the country have been forced to reckon with protests against the war in Gaza, universities’ ties to and investments in Israeli institutions, and silence in the face of scholasticide. In numerous cases—including at UChicago—university leadership deployed police against student-led encampments and demonstrations. With the reelection of Donald Trump, higher education faces increased threats to intellectual freedom and a slate of proposed legislation that could reshape the field as we know it.
The Kalven Report allows a notable exception to its doctrine of neutrality in situations that “threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry,” obliging the institution “to defend its interests and its values.” We ask again, what are the university’s values? How are they defined and enacted, and by whom? In what instances might they compel the university to take a position? And how do extreme power differentials and threats of violence contradict or undermine these values?
Please join us for a conversation with Eman Abdelhadi, Robert Vargas, and Gabriel Winant as they further consider how we might define the values that shape our work and identify those that we need to incorporate into campus culture more fully. Jonathan Levy will moderate, and we invite you to join us for a reception in Cobb 310 after the event.
Eman Abdelhadi is assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Sociology, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Her broad research interests are gender, race, migration and religion, and her work is animated by a substantive interest in the experiences of Muslims in the United States. She is co-author of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022).
Robert Vargas is professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Vargas is a social scientist interested in research on cities, law, and race. His writing and teaching focus on identifying the political-economic forces shaping neighborhood conditions and city responses to social problems. He is the author of award-winning books Wounded City: Violent Turf Wars in a Chicago Barrio (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Uninsured in Chicago: How the Social Safety Net Leaves Latinos Behind (NYU Press, 2022).
Gabriel Winant is associate professor of History and the College at the University of Chicago and a 3CT fellow. Winant is a historian of the social structures of inequality in modern American capitalism. He is broadly interested in transformations in the social division of labor and the making and management of social difference through this process. His first book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Manufacturing and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America (Harvard University Press, 2021) investigates the rise of the “service economy” in the wake of manufacturing.
Jonathan Levy is a historian of economic life and of the United States, with interests in the relationships among business history, political economy, legal history, and the history of ideas and culture. Levy’s most recently completed book, Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (Random House, 2021), is a history of American economic life from British colonial settlement through the Great Recession. Levy is James Westfall Thompson Professor of US History, Fundamentals, Social Thought, and the College, and a fellow of 3CT.
