The Duke "Culture of Learning": A Provost's Reflections on Academic Freedom and Other Important Matters Pertaining to Classroom Discourse
Remarks by Provost Peter Lange to Academic Council, March 24, 2005
In the Jan. 25 issue of the Chronicle, a Duke student complained about what he perceived as propagandizing in one of his classes: "One of the most insulting moments of my Duke education occurred in an ancient Chinese history class in spring 2003, when the U.S. was preparing to invade Iraq . Our teacher took a break from Confucius and the Han Dynasty to stage a puzzling "teach-in" about Iraq in conjunction with some national organization. During this supposedly neutral discussion, she regaled us with facts and assertions suggesting that the Iraq war was scandalous, foolish and doomed to fail ..." If the student's account provides to be accurate, do you think that the instructor's conduct was a legitimate use of class time? Or did it go beyond the limits of academic freedom, in which case, what action do you think might be appropriate on the part of the academic administration?
I welcome the opportunity to respond to this question. I especially do so because the topic and my response provide further opportunity to think about themes developed in President Brodhead's colloquy with the undergraduates on Tuesday, March 22, with its stress on active learning and the critical role of engagement and dialogue in fostering learning . (http://www.duke.edu/president/education0305/education_address.html)
The question is a vexing one for me; and I anticipate that my response may not satisfy those seeking easy nostrums or ironclad guidelines. What is vexing about the question.and the account it contains.is that it provides far too little information to develop a firm or informed answer. As we are all aware, bad pedagogy need not violate academic freedom, and the exercise of academic freedom can in fact be bad pedagogy. It is possible, once one knew more details than those provided by this one Chronicle account, that that is all we have here: a case of poor teaching. Or, as is also possible, good teaching was actually going on and was simply not recognized by this student.
Perhaps in explaining why I think the question provides too little substance to enable a clear and firm answer, I can take us some way toward understanding what I think should characterize what I would call our "campus culture of learning", by which I mean the climate for teaching, learning and intellectual engagement that is required if teachers are best to communicate and challenge their students and to learn from them, and students are to be provided the richest opportunities to engage their minds and spirits in the active act of learning from their instructors, from each other and from the variety of experiences which being a student at Duke accords them..
A culture such as this is built up from the multiple experiences of teaching and learning that we should mutually undertake in interaction with our students every day. They are experiences that vary markedly in their formality, in their intentionality (as we know, much learning - both good and less good - happens in unintended ways) and in the extent to which the teaching and learning occurs between faculty and students, between faculty and faculty and between students teaching and learning from each other.
Our learning culture is also embodied in how each of us (faculty and students alike) regards our rights and responsibilities. Academic freedom is a right that brings with it responsibilities in its use. This is especially so in the classroom where the authority of the faculty member is most assumed, and hence its exercise needs to be most conscientiously exercised.
Let me start with a premise: Creating, fostering and enhancing our culture of learning must be our goal. This goal must guide our decisions about how we judge and possibly intervene in any specific event or incident that may appear to threaten the quality of that culture. In determining whether such a threat exists and whether and how to respond to it, it is worth remembering that our culture of learning is best fostered by shared norms of conduct, ones that encourage and accept the free expression of ideas and that reflect mutual respect for the expression of ideas by others.
Such shared norms, and the behavioral habits that reflect them, stand in some contrast to formal rules that seek sharply to define "appropriate" or "legitimate" behavior. Such "rules" in the academic context are likely almost always to falter in the face of the complex processes through which students learn and our faculty teach or, at times, through which our faculty learn from what their students say and do. The application of formal rules, while occasionally necessary, is unlikely to advance the deeper commitments that must support a true culture of learning.
Why is this so? The process of learning is a complex one and the matters on which faculty have a responsibility to teach on a campus such as ours often extend beyond their direct fields of expertise. The emphasis that students, administrators, and many faculty place on student-faculty interaction only underlines this point. Students learn many things, in many ways, throughout their campus careers and faculty can contribute to that learning in multiple ways as well. This is perhaps the greatest distinctive feature of the teaching and learning process at a residential college or university that still highly values teaching and the individual and small group learning process.
With this understood, it begins to become clear why the question, as posed, can not be satisfactorily answered. To begin to answer it appropriately, one would need to know such elements as (and this list is not exhaustive):
• Trivially, the size of the class;
• The nature of the relationships and understanding between the faculty member and the students that had developed over the course of the days, weeks or months that the class had been taught;
• The extent to which the faculty member had established a class environment in which issues outside the strict definition of the course material had been raised in the past for debate among the students, possibly in conjunction with materials in the course. I can, for instance, certainly remember times when I was taking courses including Thucydides The Peloponnesian Wars or De Tocqueville's Democracy in America and faculty members would "digress" into discussions of contemporary events, digressions that both illuminated and brought to life the class material being presented and also helped me think more profoundly about life, politics and the society around me. My classes were enriched, not impoverished nor "slanted", by such flights into the contemporary;
• The degree to which the faculty member's presentation of the Iraq war was offered and understood to open debate.or to close it.or simply as an harangue;
• the way that the expression of views different from those of the professor would be understood to contribute to the classroom experience and to foster learning or to possibly visit retribution of some sort on the "combative" student;
• Whether the opinion of the one "offended" student was shared by others. Individual student's sensitivities to issues such as these, and their expectations for their classes and for the roles of their professors in their overall learning experience, vary substantially. I am sure we do not want to have our professors tailor their teaching - broadly understood - to one model, much less the model that might be that of the only, or one of the only, offended students. To do would be to surrender control of our learning culture to the norms of the least open, most easily offended students, those perhaps least willing to engage in the give-and-take that constitutes a critical feature of that culture and of the learning process more generally.
Beyond these considerations, I would add the following: if we are to encourage lively teaching and learning, student and faculty engagement and a breadth of types of learning experiences at Duke, we must be most attentive not to create an atmosphere in which faculty or students - and I stress this rule applies to both - feel constrained by "custom," customary ideas or "politeness" in what and how they communicate with one another about issues of importance. Mutual respect, but not deference, is what is important. Hence, the instinct to call on administrators to intervene, much less the desire of administrators to do so, in ways that might have the effect of explicitly or implicitly creating such constraints, must be curbed. And, on my part, there is a concern that almost all administrative interventions will have this effect. What this means (and this is a point which I will repeat below) for the most part discomforts such as those described in the question should be settled "on the ground," by those directly affected, and through open discussion and even debate. When done well, the experience of settling the problem becomes part of the learning experience itself and reinforces the broader learning culture
That said, I do not want to be misunderstood. Classes are primarily for the teaching of the advertised and expected subject matter and professors can be expected to devote all, or certainly most, of their time to teaching that material in those classes and students to learning it. Deviating from doing so should be considered a privilege to be exercised with care and substantial forethought. To fail to do so on a regular basis is, ironically, to devalue the subject expertise for which we are hired and to which we dedicate our intellectual lives. Since I believe most of our faculty do in fact have that dedication, I must assume that rare is the circumstance in which they will abuse their ability to choose what they teach or to squander the time that they have to teach their subjects. After all, one of the most common experiences among us as teachers is regret at not having that extra class or two to really complete teaching our subject.
As this suggests, great care must be taken when deviating from the expected teaching agenda. The conditions I outlined above for understanding if possible abuse of the classroom has occurred also present some of the considerations to which I would expect our faculty to attend, and our students to use, in judging whether such an abuse has occurred. And, of course, they also reflect some of the conditions to which we as administrators must be attentive as we monitor whether our learning climate is being fostered or degraded.
Of course, abuses may occur. What, in these circumstances, is the best recourse for the student who feels the classroom has been misused? Probably the best and first lines of response should be direct ones: to the professor, in the class or outside and in private, alone or in concert with fellow, like-thinking students. This too would be in the spirit of a mutually reinforced learning climate. Recourse beyond that - to others - might begin with a colleague of the professor or another faculty member, or perhaps the chair of the department. After all, those colleagues are likely to be much more knowledgeable about the circumstances and conditions I have mentioned and much more likely to make a reasoned intervention if called for and to get a reasonable and non-defensive response from the "accused" faculty member. Recourse to the ALLEN BUILDING , be it to a Dean or the Provost, as is suggested in the question, is unlikely to be the first, second or even third best course of action.