The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed

To me, a much more disturbing trend in higher education is allowing wealthy donors to set the ideological agendas of universities. The James G. Martin Center, despite its “.Center “domain name is a far-right think tank funded by the ultra conservative Pope family of North Carolina. You may know them from their bankrolling of the disenfranchisement and gerrymandering efforts in that state.

You always hear from these folks how their ideas are being suppressed etc. But they have a very powerful platform.

In the student letter published to defend him, there's a couple of paragraphs that at least allude to what appears to have been the underlying controversy: https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2018/05/in-defense-of-...

"Because of this, Professor Charney often takes on positions that are not his own in order to illustrate perspectives from across the spectrum. For example, in 2016 during the peak of the Allen building protests, he spent a whole class discussing the motivations and tactics of the protestors and challenging his students to argue cogently in favor of or against the movement. Though in some cases this put the burden on protesters in his class to justify their actions, it also exposed the unsavory and borderline racist opinions of others. His rationale is clear: without confronting new ideas, students go through Duke unchallenged and are unable to evaluate the merits of competing claims.

To be sure, Charney’s courses elicit a discomfort inherent to any situation that requires students to re-evaluate their most deeply held convictions. In presenting differing perspectives on sensitive topics, some are concerned that his class reproduces systems and structures of inequality involving notions of class, privilege and power. The concern here is that, in the name of “diversity of opinion,” the class becomes a staging ground for perspectives that reinforce the negative racial, class, and gender power dynamics that exist in society and on this campus. In recognition of this, he makes sincere and intentional efforts to reach out to students who might feel hurt or offended by the class discussions. In these cases, he seeks to address the offense and listens genuinely to recommended changes to the ways in which he teaches sensitive subject matter."

(While searching for that, I also came across this: https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2017/04/student-conduc... which is unrelated, but also fairly unflattering.)

>> microagressing them

> Somehow I'm reminded of the debate over corporal punishment in schools, where pedagogical effectiveness takes a back seat to more primal ideas about punishment, conformity, and order. People used to be beaten for being left-handed, remember.

Can you provide some context to justify comparing microagressions with beating people with sticks?

While I agree and sympathize with Professor Charney's on one level, on another the real problem (IMHO) is the lack of legit opportunities in Higher Ed.

In the corporate world people are fired or let go for silly reasons or non-reasons all the time: that's at-will employment. But for people in most fields they just find another job and move on; the problem here is there aren't many opportunities to teach at a prestigious university, at least not at anything resembling a living wage.

Years ago I was working for this one tech company who terminated a guy in his late 50s who'd been there over 30 years. I ran into him crying in the bathroom -- he asked me at his age, what was he going to do?

Two wrongs don't make a right -- but making people unfireable (tenure) doesn't seem fair either.

Hope Professor Charney finds another gig but I don't know if it's the outrage he presents it as here.

I guess you should take a statistics class before taking this class so that you can understand that people are varied and different and not entirely defined by which groups they fit into.

EDIT: NB In case it is not clear I personally don't think that there are meaningful e.g. IQ differences between the (in my opinion totally arbitrary) groups of humans that people divide other people into where those groups are based on external characteristics.