This Sawyer Seminar looks at the emergence of risk management as a deeply ingrained organizing feature and priority of modern US universities and considers its implications for academic freedom and democratic governance.
Vast bureaucracies within universities are dedicated to defining risks that must be addressed, guarding against them, tracking their emergence, pursuing corrective measures, and mitigating harms. Yet the suite of risk logics that dominate university governance—financial, operational, reputational, and strategic risks—focus primarily on pressures from legislators, trustees, donors, funders, corporations, and consumers, while giving less sustained attention to harms to various internal constituencies or to marginalized communities inside and outside the university. Prevailing risk containment strategies also exist in uneasy tension with the imperative to embrace risk in paradigm-shifting research and teaching. How then should universities reconcile these conflicting goals and needs over the short- and long-term?
To explore these concerns, we turn to newer, more expansive conceptualizations of social threat that see questions of risk as indissociable from questions of vulnerability. As researchers note, not only do risk containment efforts come with trade-offs that can quietly hinder long-term goals, but the burdens of risk containment are often unevenly distributed among groups thereby creating or entrenching inequalities. A more capacious vision of risk that centers ethics and values is particularly amenable to the humanistic methods at the center of our study. Till now, risk management has proceeded with little input from humanists, whose work has been sidelined or dismissed entirely as incompatible with the scientific study of risk. Our initiative brings the perspectives and resources of the humanities directly to bear on understandings of risk management as a core feature of the modern university–as well as a historically contingent category itself. Drawing on humanistic methods and with the guidance of a diverse group of scholars across multiple disciplines and interdisciplines, we will make sense of how risk management took hold, challenge its organizational importance, and explore and assess its implications, particularly for academic freedom and democracy. Our ultimate goal is to identify new structures and arrangements that are better suited to the foundational commitments of universities and to their pursuit of knowledge and the social good. Such work is especially urgent at public universities such as our own that are both dependent upon public support for their existence and, when at their best, promote the well-being of society.
The title of the Sawyer Seminar “At Risk U,” registers the here and now of the Seminar. Our project locates its urgency in the place where we work and live and at a critical moment in our university’s history. It conveys that we are writing from within universities and about universities, at a moment when bedrock principles of academic freedom are under threat as never before. We are inescapably “at” a workplace we have dubbed Risk U. We are also pursuing this research at a time when our work and our workplace are profoundly “at risk” themselves. The “at risk” conveys that irony and that vulnerability.
Activities began in Fall 2025 with a regular convening of the project’s principal investigators and core participants, and the commencement of faculty-led case study research, followed by a public speaker series beginning in January 2026, a campus-wide request for proposals for micro-grant supported research, teaching, and events, and a culminating symposium in Spring 2027, where project leaders, in conversation with campus administrators, will aim to facilitate specific actions toward change.
On the Mellon Sawyer Seminars
The Sawyer Seminar program is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest supporter of the humanities, arts, and culture. Established in 1994, the Sawyer Seminars provide funding to institutions for comparative research on the historical and cultural factors in current affairs. The 2025 Sawyer Seminar theme on the study of academic freedom and democracy in the American university, celebrates the Sawyer Seminars’ mission of elevating critical scholarship while also emphasizing Mellon’s commitment to supporting work that broadens and deepens our understanding of American history and culture. The seminar format is unique and allows for collaboration among a broad, interdisciplinary group of scholars, as well as engagement with the campus community and the wider public.