Leaning in to Dialogue
Dear Duke community:
Our university runs on dialogue. In the classroom, the exchange of ideas fuels learning; in research teams, cooperation and collaboration drive new discoveries. The ability to engage each other in conversation in good faith and with an open mind is essential to everything we do at Duke. As the dean of Duke Chapel, Rev. Dr. Luke Powery, noted this week, even our university bylaws urge “a respectful spirit of dialogue and understanding.”
That spirit was on full display last week when more than 300 Duke faculty, staff, students, and trainees participated in the 2024 Provost’s Forum, “Universities and the Israel-Palestine Conflict: How to Discuss, How to Engage?” Through in-depth and thought-provoking sessions, we heard how members of our community are working to bridge differences and how we can join them in doing so. In the forum's keynote, we heard how we can address students’ experiences of Islamophobia and antisemitism, which have risen on college campuses over the last year. The event was the first in a full slate of activities this semester organized by the Provost’s Initiative on the Middle East and featuring speakers from a range of disciplines, perspectives, and viewpoints.
Dialogue is critical to our goal of building an inclusive community where everyone can thrive, and the conflict in the Middle East is not the only issue on which we hold diverse points of view and where marginalization of voices, exclusion of minority opinions, and self-censorship pose impediments to that goal. We must widen our efforts to engage challenging societal issues from multiple and divergent perspectives and nurture the habits and skills needed for difficult conversations.
To that end, this fall I am launching the Provost’s Initiative on Free Inquiry, Pluralism, and Belonging, a campus-wide effort to support open deliberation in the classroom and across our campus. This initiative aims to complement work already underway or being planned in departments, schools, centers, and institutes with support for research on polarization and bridge-building, invited scholars who bring different perspectives, new curricular offerings on civil discourse, and skill-building for all members of our community. We will soon begin reaching out to invite input and participation from students, trainees, faculty, and staff.
This new effort will continue our work on the Middle East and incorporate an additional focus on the health of democracies, the challenges they have faced in the past and those they face in the present, both nationally and internationally, and the role of universities in fostering democratic values in a pluralistic society. Already, the Sanford School of Public Policy and Polis: Center for Politics have launched a series of events exploring political polarization, including a fireside chat I participated in earlier this month with former Sen. Richard Burr, and a Bass Fellows workshop on teaching after the election is being planned for faculty.
Finally, I am delighted that the Academic Council, in consultation with the Offices of the President and Provost, has assembled and charged a faculty committee to examine the state of academic freedom and responsibility, free expression, and engagement at Duke. Academic freedom is fundamental to a university’s core missions of research, teaching, and service, and this moment presents an opportunity to reflect on and examine Duke’s commitment to academic freedom and related issues of free expression and engagement. The committee will work throughout this academic year, engaging with a broad range of individuals and groups in the Duke community, and expects to submit a report in the spring of 2025 to the Academic Council that will also be shared with President Price and me.
Civil discourse is said to be in short supply in our society, but I’m heartened by what I see at Duke, and I look forward to the continued progress that I hope these efforts will yield. I encourage us all to continue to lean into respectful dialogue as the best path to learning, discovery, and greater understanding for all.
Sincerely,
Provost
Alfred J. Hooks E '68 Distinguished Professor