In 2019, after nearly two decades at Duke University, one of its most popular—and controversial—professors was abruptly ousted. For the first time, Evan Charney reveals the untold story behind his departure. For a transcript of this episode: https://bit.ly/campusfiles-transcripts To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the story behind Evan Charney's departure from Duke?
On every college campus, there are professors whose reputation extends far beyond their department. At Duke, that professor was Evan Charney, a fixture in the public policy department for nearly two decades. He was something of an academic celebrity at a school that typically reserves worship for its basketball stars. Friends who took his class couldn't stop talking about it.
Chapter 2: Who is Evan Charney and why was he popular at Duke?
His class makes you think differently, they'd say. Naturally, I had to see what all the fuss was about. But, just as I was about to enroll, I heard the news. Evan Charney was being pushed out. I'm Margo Gray. This week on Campus Files, the story of Evan Charney and what it says about the future of academic freedom in higher education. When you were a kid, what did you imagine becoming?
An astronaut? A soccer player? A rock star? Personally, I wanted to be a famous chef. Evan Charney? His childhood dream was a bit more unconventional. He wanted to be an ethologist. That's a zoologist who studies animal behavior in the wild. I had to look it up.
I was a very strange child, but I was always an intellectual in the good sense of the term. And I think I always knew I was going to PhD from the time I was a child.
Once Charney entered academia, he never looked back. He earned his undergraduate degree from Hunter College, then went on to get a doctorate and a master's degree from Harvard University, before joining Duke's faculty in 1999.
And it wasn't until I actually started teaching as a professor that I discovered just how much I loved teaching, how exhilarating I found it, and how much I loved working with young people. And how there's a certain high that comes with teaching, especially when teaching goes well, that is just incomparable.
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Chapter 3: What teaching methods did Evan Charney use?
The first course he taught, Policy Choices Value Conflict, was the undergraduate ethics course for all public policy majors. It was an introduction to moral philosophy and its application to some of the greatest contemporary moral dilemmas, issues ranging from abortion to seatbelt laws to physicians' assisted suicide to hate speech.
The class was designed to give students the tools to make coherent and consistent arguments on multiple sides of any issue.
Over time, as the course progressed, my sense of what my mission was grew. I realized that, and I mean this quite seriously, that when students come to class, Young adults, 18, 19, they feel they know what is right and what is wrong. They feel they know all the answers. And my first mission as a teacher was to show them that they didn't know anything.
Charney believes that when most students entered his classroom, they had never really been challenged on their foundational moral beliefs. They were in what he liked to call a dogmatic slumber. The objective of his course was to wake them up.
Chapter 4: Why was Evan Charney's course considered controversial?
I would say to them, look, Socratic wisdom begins with a sense of your own ignorance with an awareness that you do not know what you thought you know. So it's going to be one of my central tasks in this class to relentlessly attack your deepest hell convictions and cherished ideals. And I am going to point out to you that your beliefs are unfounded or contradictory.
As students learned very quickly, this was done, believe it or not, in a spirit of respect and empathy and fellow feeling. And I made clear to the students that if I can go after you, you can go after me. In fact, I encourage you to do this.
Charney insists that he poked holes in students' arguments not for the sake of belittling them and their opinions, but for the sake of teaching them how to think critically, how to justify their beliefs, and how to identify the flaws and contradictions in their own arguments.
One of the best topics that I dealt with in terms of trying to lead students into a state of aporia, that is a state where they did not know what to say, was when I did bestiality, people having sex with animals. So I would start by saying, okay, I'm going to give the following arguments against homosexuality. And I said, you know, I think it's unnatural.
You know, and students would say, what are you talking about? You know, it occurs in nature. And I say, yes, but it doesn't lead to procreation. And the students, you know, they were being indulgent because they knew I was being stupid for some reason. And then I'd say, okay, how about this? And then I would show them a video.
Now, the video was not of people having sex with animals, but it was a video by someone who was promoting what adherents of this like to call zoophilia. And the first thing students would start to say is, oh, well, that's unnatural. And I'd say, what did you just say? I said, you can't say it's unnatural. I just said something was unnatural and you laughed at me. You tore me apart.
Students did not know what to say. They were completely and totally lost.
The success of the course depended upon students not knowing where Charney stood on any given issue. Students inevitably spent the semester trying to pin down his politics, which is why he'd re-registered as an independent voter early on in his teaching career.
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Chapter 5: What led to Evan Charney's contract not being renewed?
One class, he would argue passionately and convincingly for the redistribution of wealth, only to argue exactly the opposite stance the following class.
And I told them, I am not going to give you the answers to controversial questions. I'm going to give you the tools to come up with reasonable defenses of different sides of any given issue. But I don't want you to believe in, quote unquote, the right answer because it's the answer I believe in. The success of the class also depended upon there being a plurality of different points of view.
So one of the ways in which I would address this was I would ask the question, how many of you believe that women should have a right to have an abortion? And everyone would raise their hands and I'd say, OK, bullshit. I do not believe that everyone in this class has the same point of view. I do not believe there is a uniformity of opinion in this class.
And then I would tell them if those who held conservative views were going to engage in in self-censorship then it would spell the death of the class because this class is about above all being intellectually challenged
Charney cites his willingness to challenge students as the reason that he was repeatedly recognized as one of the university's three most popular professors, that he received above-average student teaching evaluations, and that he was the recipient of multiple teaching awards.
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Chapter 6: How did Evan Charney's teaching style evolve over time?
I mean, what was so sad is that there was such a hunger amongst the students for what I did, because I did things that no one else would do. And I challenged them in ways that no one else would challenge them.
So you can imagine Charney's surprise when in April 2018, he got the news. His contract would not be renewed. In effect, he was fired. Charney wasn't sure why he was being let go, but he had a theory.
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Evan Charney got to know Duke in a way few professors or administrators ever do. He had insight into the kinds of things that you can't find in university pamphlets, the kinds of student dynamics, politics, and gossip that are known only to students on campus.
I had a very close relationship with a lot of my students and I enjoyed talking at length with the students. Sometimes we'd often just get together for coffee and we would talk for hours. And I would ask them questions about not just their hopes and aspirations, but about campus life.
Because I tried as far as I could to relate some of the topics that I was dealing with to students' own personal moral dilemmas and life experiences. So, for example, I spent a lot of time talking about chauvinism on the Duke campus. And it was extraordinary the extent to which I was able to show students that so much of Greek life, of nightlife,
of campus culture was dictated by men and was designed for the sexual gratification of men and so forth.
On more than one occasion, while discussing the issue of wealth stratification, Charney singled out a student wearing sorority or fraternity insignia and asked how many members of their chapter classified as below middle class.
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Chapter 7: What are the broader implications of Evan Charney's story on academic freedom?
I always felt that to be an effective teacher, it was important that I know what students were experiencing on a daily basis. The pressures, their emotions, their fears. I showed a lot of genuine care and affection toward my students and concern. And, you know, students would come to me when they were having emotional problems. I mean, I was quite moved by that. I love my students.
I don't know how many faculty could say that.
By virtue of spending so much time with his students outside of class, Charney had his finger on the pulse of his classroom environment. And around 2009, about a decade into teaching the same course at Duke, Charney began to sense a shift in his classroom.
The use of the term harm expanded to such an extent that it encompassed or came to encompass points of view that people were opposed to or that they found disagreeable. And the extent to which students would react as if I had done something to them grew and grew.
Charney remembers one of the first times a student told him they'd been harmed by his language. He was catching up with a student over coffee after class.
I think I used the term political correctness. But by the way, I was always careful to say that there is political correctness on the left and there is political correctness on the right. No ideology has a monopoly on political correctness. But she said, you know, it hurts me every time someone uses the term political correctness. And I said, did you see this scar? I said, that hurt.
Don't tell me that hearing the term political correctness hurts you. Well, she like went back in her chair, like slammed back and was stupefied because she thought she had a Trump card that was going to shut me up. It wasn't because of what I said, per se.
It was because, you know, I didn't fall at her feet and beg for forgiveness and sort of reinforce the perverse ways in which students understand that they can exercise control over their professors. That was the beginning of something really important for me.
Charney was noticing a phenomenon that wouldn't be fully articulated or discussed for about another decade when Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff published their best-selling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.
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