The EGS administration is currently completing a new Strategic Plan for 2025-2030 that will be approved in its December Foundation Board meeting. This Plan will be reviewed and updated yearly, and will be accompanied by a “President’s Statement”. We offer the initial Statement here, as we launch our new website.

2024 marks the date of a new phase in the history of this storied institution. Our mission, our vision and our spirit remain unchanged, so the transformations may go unnoticed by many. But we work from a new administrative platform that consolidates our stance going forward as a unified institution. Our new website will signal (and define) these changes.

For this first in a series of “President’s Statements” I want to speak to our moment by restating our purpose and offering a somewhat formal description of a renewed commitment.

     In the work of its two divisions, and for almost three decades, the European Graduate School has sought to pursue forms of cross-disciplinary research and teaching that draw deeply upon philosophical foundations and reach across the humanities, social sciences and sciences. Both divisions have sought to pursue forms of creative thought and meaningful engagement that answer concretely to the social needs they serve.  Both have drawn significantly upon the arts in the teaching and research that have brought us to where we are today.

 Art, Health and Society maintains a strong vocational orientation designed for professionals in education, therapy, and coaching, while serving the academic field of expressive arts.  Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought pursues fundamental questioning in the general field of social thought that is both inventive and at the highest academic level.  The divisional practices and emphases thus differ, but the values and many goals guiding their work overlap profoundly.  They seek the conditions of human meaning that evolve in socio-historical contexts and in forms of relation with the environing world.  They work to draw forth and enhance that meaning in both study and relational engagement.

The reference to meaning in this statement signals that the initiatives of the divisions of the European Graduate School proceed from a profound anchoring in the humanities and the arts.  The questions addressed in their academic pursuits are defined by global ecological, historical, and socio-political conditions.  As is already widely recognized today, such questions demand innovative and extensive cross-disciplinary approaches.  But the European Graduate School, with its exceptional  philosophical resources and its grounding in practices of study native to the humanities and arts, is singularly prepared to advance fertile forms of new disciplinary encounter and interaction that are pertinent for contemporary society.  It is prepared to translate disciplinary discovery from scientific and social-scientific fields in ways that are both well-founded and creative.

The Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought Division plays a leading role in global critical thought.  For decades, it has shaped important currents in the field generally referred to as “theory” The Art, Health and Society Division, for its part, pursues a legacy in expressive arts practices that derives from the work of the EGS’s founder, Paolo Knill, and is positioned to assume a guiding role in significant parts of this field, including ecopoiesis, art-based research, and social change. Its international network of affiliate institutes provides a very effective platform for global outreach.

Both divisions definitely aspire to play guiding roles in contemporary thought and transformative practice through the arts, but they do not seek dominance with particular schools of thought or philosophical positions.  They seek, rather, to maintain a questioning and creative stance that is responsive to global needs.  It is this stance, and the relational ethics presupposed by it, that they seek to advance as an institution of learning. What the EGS thus seeks to “propagate” may be described as values of study and creative practice.  Speaking in traditional academic terms, the European Graduate School upholds the fundamental ambitions of a curriculum devoted to the liberal arts (though it does this at a graduate level). In more contemporary terms, it seeks to enable forms of modern thought and interactive practice that embody new syntheses of human knowledge and possibilities of worldly engagement.  The values upheld in this endeavor are themselves quite established in certain respects; they involve integrity in all facets of research, together with respect for academic freedom and the views and experiences of others.  The EGS also seeks to foster joy in intellectual challenge and free inquiry, leaving behind stultifying structures for the administration of

knowledge. It seeks a constant renewal of the core ideals of higher education, exploring what a modern university can do.

As an institution, the EGS looks to models and predecessors such as the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (for excellence), and the Black Mountain College in North Carolina (for creative discovery).  In pedagogy, it aspires to the highest values of the Humboldtian model (though it moves “research-led teaching” into “teaching-led research”), and draws inspiration from the North American concept of the graduate seminar and the examples of seminars directed by leading modern European thinkers.

     We note that these latter seminars have had the distinctive feature of being public events that have hosted a very wide range of students, some destined for academic careers, some already professors, and some active in other professional fields.  The EGS takes inspiration from these examples for its efforts in advancing notions of continuing education and professional development that serve more than intellectual curiosity or some complementary or remedial function.  It strives to advance as a center of learning that serves a true diversity of intellectual aspirations.  Significant past success in this endeavor (with mature students who have already secured paths in architecture, law, finance, museum curation, psychoanalysis or the arts) point to the possibility of redefining the very meaning of the phrase, “continuing education”  The EGS sees this as a quite realizable and worthy ambition in the contemporary world of higher education, one that is particularly important for the well-being of the humanities.

The vision sketched here requires growth for its achievement.  Such growth is predicated on financial support, grants, and possible partnerships.  Financial strength will support an extension and deepening of the institution’s global reach through scholarship offerings and more substantial programming year-wide.  It will also allow a development of the institution’s artistic programming and afford more frequent public events featuring distinguished speakers.  In a not-too-distant future, the institution will seek (perhaps even design) a more ample campus, affording suitable library facilities and performance and lecture spaces.  But its guiding ambition will be to sustain the spirit of hospitality, creativity, and intellectual commitment that animates it, in whatever space or spaces it enters in the future.

I close with a final word of gratitude to all those who have made it possible for us to continue to maintain this ambition.

Christopher Fynsk