What Are The Faculty Roundtables?

The Roundtable initiative is an ongoing program that enables thousands of professors at leading universities across the country to explore scientific and spiritual questions in community with peers. Roundtable events feature experts sharing insights on a pressing question and participants (mostly faculty) exploring that question further over a meal. The initiative began in Amherst in 2002, and spread to Harvard and MIT in 2005, and to Brown, Dartmouth and Yale in 2014, and then to Columbia in 2017. Most recently, this grant from the Templeton Foundation has launched Roundtables through Local Coordinators at Chicago, Cornell, Duke, Northwestern, University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton.

Over the 3 years of the grant, Roundtables will seat over 4,872 participants for at minimum 67 Roundtables, seating approximately 3,600 faculty and high-level administrators from 12 of the top 16 US universities, and will engage them in vital conversations about the questions that matter most. Read more about the grant and the Templeton Foundation here.