Events
An ongoing series of Forums for Penn Faculty and the greater Penn CommunityRecordings of most events are archived on this site.
2025 Roundtables: The Future of American Universities
U.S. higher education has been faced significant challenges for many years, and those challenges are likely to increase. We must think broadly, deeply, and creatively about the headwinds facing colleges and universities. A select group of thought leaders will visit Penn for discussions on three critical topics:
- the political/policy challenges facing higher education,
- the value of higher education (by which we mean both the dollars-and-cents cost and its value more generally in creating an informed citizenry and ‘better’ society), and
- the future: if and how the fundamentals of higher education will change.
Thursday, January 30, 2025
4:00pm to 5:30pm ET
Kleinman Energy Forum
Fisher Fine Arts Library, 4th Floor
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
4:30pm – 6:00pm
The Agora, Annenberg Public Policy Center
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
4:30pm – 6:00pm ET
Kleinman Energy Forum
Fisher Fine Arts Library, 4th Floor
2024 Roundtables on Academic Freedom and Open Expression
Like most institutions of higher education, the University of Pennsylvania “affirms, supports and cherishes the concepts of freedom of thought, inquiry, speech, and lawful assembly” and “encourages freedom of inquiry, discourse, teaching, research, and publication.”
Yet, there is sharp disagreement about the meaning and practice of open expression and academic freedom at Penn and at other universities. What exactly do those concepts mean? What rights do they confer? What are their limits? To what extent are they threatened in the current political and social climate? How can the central function of a university—educating students and producing new knowledge—survive in the face of such threats?
Two Faculty Senate Roundtables hosted groups of the nation’s leading scholars for timely discussions on these topics followed by questions from the audience.