The conference brought together faculty, students, and experts from Lithuania, Belarus, Bulgaria, USA, Croatia, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and other countries on a debate regarding ways and means of addressing the challenges faced by higher education institutions and societies when it comes to teaching and learning humanities nowadays.
Keynote speaker of the conference President Emeritus of the Hampshire College Prof. Greg Prince Jr. shared his insight on liberal education as a trans-national and trans-cultural education for a global community. In his keynote address, Prof. Prince raised a question of the basis of humanities and specified five principles of it: “The Humanities, as a field, is defined by a set of questions, not by a set of disciplines; because the Humanities as a field is defined by questions, not content, it subsumes all fields and disciplines. The opposite is not true; the Humanities are both timeless and time-bound; the Humanities depend on the principle that truth exists even if it can never be fully captured or encompassed; and there is no global issue that humankind faces that ultimately is not, at its core, a Humanities question, dependent on what it means to be human”.
Within the framework of the conference, a broad range of the topics was covered, such as:
- “The Contemporary University” — Prof. Sergei Ignatov (EHU)
- “Humanities under Attack” — Prof. Antony Todorov (New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria)
- “Poetry and Technologies” — Prof. Evan Zimroth (Queens College, The City University of New York, USA)
- “Human being in the Age of Technology” — Prof. Anatoli Mikhailov (EHU)
- “The Common is the Content: Liberal Arts Education in Our Era of Technological Innovation” — Assoc. Prof. J.D. Mininger (LCC International University, Lithuania)
- “Ethical Dilemmas. How to teach ethics in the age of technology” — Prof. Hristo Todorov (New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria)
- “The Education of Human and Contemporary Challenges” — Assoc. Prof. Valerii Monakhov (Saint Petersburg State University, Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia)
- “Technology-aided Research and Education – Opening Up the Oral Tradition of the Manas Epos in Kyrgyzstan” — Assistant Prof. James Plumtree (American University of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan)
and others.
Besides that, a cohort of EHU students took part in an EHU Debate Union-organised public debate “Depth vs Breadth of Humanities Education”.
In an ending discussion, Vice President of the LCC International University Assoc. Prof. J.D Mininger has announced that in AY 2019/20, LCC and EHU will host a series of workshops on liberal arts education, starting with a kick-off seminar on October 11 in Klaipėda, Lithuania.
