Universities are undergoing rapid changes in response to dynamic and even contradictory forces that pose special challenges to the humanities and social sciences. In a candid effort to address these complex issues, the Cornell University Institute for German Cultural Studies and the Institute for European Studies, in cooperation with the Cornell administration, have organized a symposium titled "The Future of the Humanities in the Corporate University: A Report From Berlin and an Invitation to a Cornell Dialogue," Tuesday, April 3, from 4 to 6 p.m. in 155 Olin Hall. It is free and open to the public.

Guest speakers at the Cornell symposium will include: President Hunter Rawlings; Provost Biddy Martin; Walter Cohen, vice provost and dean of the Graduate School; and Philip Lewis, the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Conveners will be: Peter Hohendahl, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German and Comparative Literature and director of the Institute for German Cultural Studies; and Davydd Greenwood, Goldwin Smith Professor of Anthropology and director of the Institute for European Studies.

The symposium's presentations will be renderings of key topics previously addressed in detail by members of a Cornell delegation – including Rawlings, Martin, Cohen, Lewis and Hohendahl – at a conference on the same topic held at the Humboldt University of Berlin this past October. Independently, the Institute for European Studies began a yearlong seminar in the fall on the future of universities.

"With globalization and corporativization, universities are being transformed in profound ways," says Greenwood. "While diatribes abound, academic inquiry about trends of change in the academy is rare, as if the university itself were not a legitimate subject for humanistic and social scientific study. Sustained analysis of these complex issues is essential to our collective future, and it is greatly to the adminstration's credit that they willingly take this on in a public format."