Mission Statement Responses

I see this new phase in the history of a well-established scholarly journal as offering a major opportunity. That opportunity needs to be placed in a context. There are three key elements to this context, from the point of view of the American research university and the geographies of the rest of the world. First, globalization has encouraged greater traffic among disciplines, regions, and institutions based primarily on growing access to information, knowledge, and methodology through the Internet and the World Wide Web. Second, and in roughly the same period, the humanities have become increasingly marginalized as a result of the rise of vocational, professional, and skill-based knowledge throughout the world. This has been tied to a deepening crisis of the research university, which has lost any clear sense of its distinctive mission. Third, there is growing tension everywhere between the claims of heritage, identity, and religion and the claims of free expression, opinion, and debate.