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President Keohane Responds to Ad Placed by Duke Conservative Union

In her Feb. 11 response, Keohane says, "No single political perspective has a monopoly on intelligence, on any topic, and our classrooms are impoverished if the expression of diverse views is discouraged..."

To the Editor:

Monday's (February 9) advertisement in The Chronicle by the Duke Conservative Union asked whether a university can be truly diverse if a preponderance of its faculty in individual departments are personally registered with one political party or another. I have found The Chronicle's subsequent coverage of the issue raised by the Duke Conservative Union to be illuminating.

 

There is an old saying that faculty members are people who "think otherwise." That surely is the case on this campus. I occasionally joke that at Duke, where we have some 1,650 faculty members, they probably have at least 1,900 opinions. In my view, that's quite healthy, for it means that our students are exposed to the widest possible range of views across many issues.

 

At the same time, I think the Duke Conservative Union has raised a question that deserves a thoughtful answer. For me, the question is not the personal political views of members of our faculty or their party affiliation, it's the quality of their scholarship and the strength of their teaching, which includes ensuring that classrooms are open to diverse, often contrary, views.

 

This semester I am teaching a course for the first time in a number of years and am enjoying it immensely. While I personally may be more liberal in my views than some of my students, as a teacher one of my main obligations is to provoke thoughtful discussion and to challenge students in ways that force them to think carefully about and, in some cases, to rethink the very premises of their arguments. My co-teacher Professor Peter Euben and I deliberately frame questions - or respond to answers - so as to make sure that a range of views is expressed on the topic of "Inequalities." I think good teachers in the humanities and social sciences are uniformly careful to do this, and there is ample evidence at Duke that most members of our faculty, regardless of their political affiliations or views, bring a similar perspective and practice to their classrooms.

 

No single political perspective has a monopoly on intelligence, on any topic, and our classrooms are impoverished if the expression of diverse views is discouraged, either by the faculty member or by fellow students. But we are also impoverished if classrooms become sterile forums where only bland views can be expressed and everyone is overly careful not to offend. Clear statements of well-articulated, provocative views stimulate deeper thought, and more discussion, than the cautious expression of ideas designed not to make anyone uncomfortable.

 

I am concerned when I hear, as I occasionally do, from a student who reports that he or she feels hesitant about raising an issue or viewpoint because of a fear of ridicule by classmates or a teacher. Some time ago, I suggested that Avery Reaves, academic affairs vice president of DSG, and Trinity College Dean Bob Thompson convene a small group of undergraduates and faculty members to talk about this problem in a relaxed and thoughtful session. My hope is that this group will help identify contemporary concerns of students, and help faculty members understand how classroom comments can sometimes be interpreted, against their own intentions, as discouraging to students who might wish to raise alternative perspectives.

 

In my State of the University address to the Academic Council this year, I emphasized the longstanding commitment to academic freedom at Duke, and specifically addressed the importance of ensuring that in our classrooms, faculty members provide an environment that is conducive to robust discussion, where students feel they can express strongly held views and disagree with their professors or their classmates within the bounds of civility. One of the fundamental tenets of our university is that we provide an environment where multiple views can be raised and students can discern for themselves which arguments are more or less meritorious. As I noted in my address to the Academic Council, "Open dialogue between human beings about issues that are subjects of conflict or misunderstanding is the only sure avenue to better understanding and to truth." The issue, therefore, is not whether a faculty member belongs to one or another party, or where in the political spectrum his or her views are, but whether the faculty member provides a classroom environment that supports learning across a wide range of views.

Yours sincerely, Nannerl O. Keohane