ABSTRACT
Complaints of a growing intolerance in universities and on attempts to exclude opposing views have been uttered frequently in Germany as well as in Britain and the US within the last years. Our leading hypothesis is that the reference to tolerance and intolerance leads right to the heart of the conflicts surrounding the task and idea of the university. In our chapter, we will first provide a philosophical groundwork for the concept of tolerance. Here, we refer to Rainer Forst’s conception of tolerance as a mutual right of justification to use this as a heuristic foil to investigate the above-mentioned conflicts. In the second part of this chapter, we will turn towards a recent dispute on academic freedom at a German university. By reviewing several open letters, letters to the editor as well as journalistic contributions, we will explore how their conceptions of tolerance and intolerance take an effect in the current debate. Afterwards, we will turn to a well-known German university’s guidelines for respectful social interaction as an attempt to meet such conflicts. In the last part of the chapter, we will draw on Derrida’s notion of the ‘university without condition’ to sketch an ethos of academic commitment as an alternative approach towards in/tolerance.
