This year’s unrest on campus and the administration’s response to it forces us to ask what a university is for. In his 1968 commencement address, Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter argues that the modern university is devoted to intellectual inquiry, an activity that requires a certain form of community and support from society. And in 2024, legal and literary theorist Stanley Fish writes that some modes of speech strengthen that inquiry while others destroy it.

Join Nathaniel Peters (Morningside) for a conversation on protest, free speech, and the purpose of a university. This dinner seminar is open to all undergraduates, graduate students, and recent graduates.