The 2026 West Coast Methods Institute Annual Meeting
The Idea of the University Today:
Newman, Lonergan, and Higher Education
April 23-25, 2025
WCMI 2026 Call for Papers
Higher education is facing an existential crisis. Whether from demographic changes, government overreach and political harassment, the rise of AI, or ideological capture and a decline in public confidence, higher education faces turbulent headwinds, leaving many institutions on the precipice of profound transformation or closure. Nevertheless, the university seems more necessary than ever as technocracy dominates culture. Writing about the university, Lonergan suggests, “A university is a reproductive organ of cultural community. … Without developed understanding, explanations are of hypnotic drugs by their virtus dormativa, truths become uncomprehended formulas, moral precepts narrow down to lists of prohibitions, and human living settles into a helpless routine without a capacity for vital adaptation and without the power of knowledge that inspires and directs the movement from real possibility to concrete achievement.” Newly minted Doctor of the Church, Saint John Henry Newman, searching for the whole in knowledge, argues, “That only is true enlargement of mind which is the power of viewing many things at once as one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence.” Does the modern university live up to such an ambitious vision? What is the whole that grounds education today? What contribution can Lonergan’s thought make to resolving the contemporary crisis in education? How should Catholic universities respond to technological and political trends in education?
WCMI 2026 takes up these questions in a conversation about the future of higher education, its purpose and mission in the midst of massive technological change and political turmoil.
Topic areas for proposals might include, but are not limited to:
- Role of values in education
- The task(s) of education amidst bias and oversight
- Integrating education amidst increasing specialization
- Understanding — authentic and artificial
- Recovering education as formation
- The relation between the church and the university
- The value of the university in contemporary society
- Changing place of the humanities
- Philosophy of Education
- The role of theology in the university
- Edtech and AI-augmented learning
- Functional Specialization and Curriculum design
- Education for citizenship
Please keep your proposals to 150 words. Send proposals for papers or panels to wcmi@gonzaga.edu by Friday, January 16, 2026.
We look forward to seeing in Spokane!
WCMI
