CFI Symposium 2025

Ready to Listen, Learning to Talk

What is Symposium?

Every spring, Gordon College devotes one Thursday, all day long (with NO classes) to hear what YOU, the student body, has to say. This is your opportunity to put on an event with your student club, lead a discussion with your friends, create a work of art with your classmates, present your senior thesis, or mount a play with your peers. This is a day meant for the student body to reverse the direction of the classroom and share what they have to say!

When is CFI Symposium?

This year the CFI Symposium will be held on Thursday, April 10th!

How do I get involved?

CFI welcomes proposals from any and all majors! Apply by April 2nd with your proposal for a 40-50 minute event that will get advertised on campus and be open to all. We especially welcome out-of-the-box thinking to connect your ideas with the overarching theme.

Keynote Lecture

About the lecture

For at least the past few decades, Americans have made a wager that our public life can simply be run by the numbers, following the neutral dictates of big data, competent technocrats and, recently, smart algorithms. This illusion is disintegrating before our eyes. Without vision, a people perish, and we desperately need new, expansive, moral and spiritual visions to give shape to our public life. But what can this mean for a multicultural, multi-faith nation like America? How do we propose and advocate for new political visions without demanding total unanimity, or descending into civil war?

About our speaker

Ian Marcus Corbin is a philosopher on faculty in Neurology at Harvard Medical School, where he co-directs the Human Network Initiative, and is a Faculty Member at the HMS Center for Bioethics. He  serves as a Senior Fellow at the think tank Capita, co-directs the Trust and Belonging Initiative at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, and serves on the  ethics  committee  at Brigham and Women's Hospital. His first book, on belonging in the modern world, is forthcoming from Yale University Press. He advises elected officials at the federal and state level, along with leaders of for-profit and non-profit enterprises, on issues of belonging, culture and flourishing.

Corbin has studied politics, religion and philosophy at Gordon College, Oxford University, Yale University and Boston College, always with an eye to the ways that deep human values function in the formation and evolution of human communities. He has taught at a number of colleges and universities in the Boston area and published widely in venues such as the Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsweek, The Point and Plough. In a former life he founded and ran a contemporary art gallery in Boston's South End.