The stresses of the twenty-first century have exposed the fault lines in Higher Education, both as an instructional space that facilitates student growth and as a social space that shapes our economic, political, and religious institutions. This book uses Paul Ricoeur’s rigorous writings to envision a Just University necessary for the years ahead.

The essays in Paul Ricoeur and the Hope of Higher Education: The Just University discuss diverse ways that Paul Ricoeur’s work provides hopeful insight and necessary provocation that should inform the task and mission of the modern university in the changing landscape of Higher Education. This volume gathers interdisciplinary scholars seeking to reestablish the place of justice as the central function of higher education in the twenty-first century. The contributors represent diverse backgrounds, including teachers, scholars, and administrators from R1 institutions, seminary and divinity schools as well as undergraduate teaching colleges. This collection, edited by Daniel Boscaljon and Jeffrey F. Keuss, offers critical and practical visions for the renewal of higher education. The first part of the book provides an internal examination of the university system and details how Ricoeur’s thinking assists on pragmatics from syllabus design to final exams to daily teaching. The second portion of the book examines the Just University’s role as a social institution within the broader cultural world and looks at how Ricoeur’s description of values informs how the university works relative to religious belief, prisons, and rural poverty.

List of Figures and Tables

Preface: Dreaming of the Just University in an Age of Crisis

Daniel Boscaljon and Jeffrey F. Keuss

Introduction: Paul Ricoeur and the Hope of a Just University

Daniel Boscaljon and Jeffrey F. Keuss

Part 1: The Just University as Instructional Space

Chapter 1: The Agon of the Summoned Self in Ricoeur’s Late Philosophy of Religion

Mark I. Wallace

Chapter 2: Reading Ricoeur Together: Interpretive Work and Surplus Meaning in a Just Pedagogy

Charles A. Gillespie

Chapter 3: Practical Formation: Teaching Critical Thinking via Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Model

Laura Schmidt Roberts

Chapter 4: Ricoeur and Transferable Skills

Glenn Whitehouse

Chapter 5: Fallible Pedagogy: How to Balance Liberation and Evaluation with Compassion

Daniel Boscaljon

Chapter 6: Oneself as Another and The Argonauts: An Attempt at Interpretive Justice

Richard A. Rosengarten

Chapter 7: Embodied Pedagogy: Reflections on Becoming Oneself

Verna Marina Ehret

Part 2: The Just University as a Social Space

Chapter 8: The Literary Self: Nostalgia, Kenosis, and Interpretation toward a Renewed Vision and Possibility for the Liberal Arts

Jeffrey F. Keuss

Chapter 9: Teaching and Learning in Just Institutions: A Ricoeurean Institutional Ethic of Higher Education

Michael Le Chevallier

Chapter 10: Should Religion-Affiliated Institutions Be Accredited? Ricoeur and the Problem of Religious Inclusivity

Nathan Eric Dickman

Chapter 11: Interpreting with and for Others: Institutional Research as Hermeneutical Reasoning

Kenneth A. Reynhout

Chapter 12: National Memory or “What is College For?”

Vero Rose Smith

Chapter 13: Doing Time and Narrative: Teaching in (and out of) Prisons with Paul Ricoeur

Howard Pickett

Chapter 14: Wounded Memory and a Pedagogy of Hope: Engaging Ricoeur Within the Context of Conflicting Pasts

Robert Vosloo