Professors Dana Brakman Reiser and Irene Ten Cate Speak at ‘The University and Democracy’ Symposium

Professors Dana Brakman Reiser, second from left, and Irene Ten Cate spoke at two different panels at “The University and Democracy” symposium in Boston. 

Centennial Professor of Law Dana Brakman Reiser and Professor Irene Ten Cate participated in a symposium titled “The University and Democracy,” which explored how academic institutions can strengthen their roles as guardians of democracy and bulwarks against authoritarianism and “reorient toward their core mission: to pursue truth and knowledge for the common good.” 

The symposium, presented by Boston University School of Law, was organized by the Boston University Law Review. Brakman Reiser, whose most recent book, For-Profit Philanthropy: Elite Power and The Threat of Limited Liability Companies, Donor-Advised Funds, And Strategic Corporate Giving (co-authored with Professor Steven A. Dean, Oxford University Press 2023), participated in a plenary panel titled “Who Regulates the University (from the outside).”  

She and the other panelists examined who controls and shapes the university from the outside, and addressed issues including non-profit corporate governance, the role of state and federal law, and accreditation.  

Ten Cate, who is an Associate Professor of Legal Writing and serves as Co-Director of the Dennis J. Block Center for the Study of International Business Law, participated in a concurrent panel titled “Competing Conceptions of the University.”   

Given the current array of converging and competing conceptions of the modern American university and its history, function, purpose, governance structure and animating values, participants discussed some of those sites of debate and modeled how to navigate competing conceptions of the university and what they mean for the future of higher education and multiracial democracy in the United States.