Teun J, Dekker (1980) is currently Acting Dean and Vice Dean of Academic Affairs and Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at University College Maastricht, where he teaches courses on the intersection of the Social Sciences and the Humanities, including History of Political Thought and Distributive Justice in Contemporary Political Philosophy. He did his Bachelors’ degree at University College Utrecht, with a double major in Social Sciences and Humanities and graduating Summa Cum Laude. Having been awarded both a VSB and a Huygens National Talent Scholarship, he went on to do his Master’s degree and Doctorate in Political Theory at St Antony’s College, Oxford University. His graduate research focused on the elaboration and defense of desert-based theories of distributive justice. He continued this research at Yale University. His current research, funded by an NWO VENI grant, aims to use the techniques of analytical philosophy to clarify contemporary political debates, and he will apply this method to the current controversy surrounding the remuneration of senior public officials. As part of this research he was Karl M. Loewenstein Fellow of Political Science and Jurisprudence at Amherst College.
Daniel Kontowski is a PhD student at the University of Winchester and a research project leader at the University of Warsaw (UW). A graduate of MISH and Kolegium Artes Liberales (both UW), he conducts comparative analyses of liberal education movement in various European countries and in the United States. Daniel’s previous research focused on different ideas behind recent developments in liberal education in Poland, Russia, the Netherlands and the US. He conducted more than 100 interviews with students, tutors, faculty members, senior administration and external experts in those four countries, and visited over 20 institutions. Partial results are in print, and the final report is going to be published later in 2016. Since October 2015, Daniel is writing a dissertation on “The values of first generation leaders in the European Liberal Education Area (1990-2015)”. The aim of the study is to approach the founders of first independent liberal education institutions established in the 1990s and 2000s in eight European countries, reconstruct their visions of liberal education and compare tehm to each other. The result of the study would be „unpacking” the popular label, identifying the aims of such educational innovation in the different contexts and identify, to what extent the founders lived ‘parallel lives’ as educators and leaders. This project is expected to conclude in 2018.
Nigel Tubbs recently started the BA Modern Liberal Arts degree at the University of Winchester, UK. Details of this programme and of the philosophy of the programme can be seen here. He is the author of several books, the most recent are Philosophy and Modern Liberal Arts Education, History of Western Philosophy, and Education in Hegel. He is currently working on a book that explores the history of the idea of the educational maxim of ‘know thyself’.
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